


if only the gods had mercy on us

by orphan_account



Series: of gods and monsters [1]
Category: Doctor Strange (2016), Iron Man (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, American Sign Language, Canon-Typical Violence, Established Relationship, M/M, Non-Consensual, Non-Graphic Rape/Non-Con, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, selective mutism, the hell is editing? i'll post this like the idiot i am
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-25
Updated: 2018-08-31
Packaged: 2019-07-02 08:30:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 2
Words: 30,011
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15792840
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Tony Stark loved Stephen Strange. He loved him more than anyone could ever imagine.But then a terrorist group attacked the convoy.Then there was a car accident.In the middle of it all, there is tired, battered love.(And, maybe, a little bit of genius)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文 available: [【授翻/铁奇异】if only the gods had mercy on us/愿神垂怜](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16121045) by [Clover_cherik](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Clover_cherik/pseuds/Clover_cherik)



> Based on [this prompt](https://ironstrangeprompts.tumblr.com/post/176937257593/prompt-55-au-tony-and-stephen-have-been-together) and written over the course of who knows how many days.

Part One:

aphrodite made you

so brutally soft

 

Caesar’s Palace. Las Vegas. The presentation room was dark as the video played, a wall of glittering tinsel behind a black podium. White roses had been placed out on tables—ironic, considering what they were celebrating—and the entirety of the room was being monitored by cold, carved eyes of giant women who held up the ceiling in replace of columns.

People were distracted by moving images and the audio. Some with feigned interest, others because it _was_ their interest. Only a few in the audience weren’t watching; paying attention to other things like their wine, their clothes or, in Tony Stark’s case, the man next to him.

Stephen Strange was a man who seemed too long to be fully human. Stretched like taffy with legs that could put a giraffe’s to shame and a torso that had enough muscle to hide bones but was quietly strong in the way the soldiers around him were not.

(And damn if that slimness wasn’t highlighted by the grey pinstripe vest he was wearing and the soft, lilac tie around his neck. Both of which Tony had bought him.)

He wasn’t handsome.

Not in the way most people would consider handsome. There was a different kind of look to him, as if someone was to hang up his x-rays they would say he had good bones. Because Stephen did have good bones; what with the sharpness of his cheekbones, the curve of his jaw, the long-ness of his neck, and the subtle dip of his shoulders. There was a length to his fingers, a serpentine slimness to them as they circled glass.

 _Damn good bones_.

They’d met at an event like this. Some scientific award Tony couldn’t care to remember. He didn’t care to remember this one either, so he leaned forward, wine burning on the tip of his tongue. One hand was placed high on a thigh, and he rested an elbow on the table.

“I can think of ten other things we could do that would be better than this,” Tony said, keeping his voice low so the words didn’t drift over the sound of the video.

Stephen was watching the screen, his eyes reflecting the light even as he smirked. “Really,” he said, words no higher than a whisper but they still rumbled through his throat and settled like autumn between them. “Ten?”

“Maybe just one,” Tony admitted, looked over his sunglasses, and grinned.

oOo

“He’s up to something,” Stephen murmured against Tony’s cheek as the cushions of the couch dipped under their combined weight. It circled the back of an airplane that hadn’t even left the terminal. Bony knees dug into the leather and slender arms wrapped loosely around a sun kissed neck while his button up shirt was pulled from trousers and pushed up, revealing the soft stretch of his stomach.

“Obie is always up to something,” Tony said, running his hands over the slim waist, dipped further to cup the round ass currently sitting on his lap. He hummed when star-silver eyes turned to him and tilted his head up for a kiss.

Stephen laughed at his need and pressed a chaste peck to the tip of the offered nose. “Promise me you’ll watch him?” His breath was hot.

“Yes, _yes_ —God, Stephen, stop _teasing_ —” Tony moaned as lips devoured the rest of his words. Hooking his arms underneath slim thighs, he lifted the other man and flipped him over.

Stephen laughed breathlessly when he was shoved into the couch, his carefully combed hair already mussed, eyes half lidded and dark. Outside the windows, the city of Las Vegas glimmered like a solar system against the black space of the desert.

Hands with small scars from old accidents, calloused by mechanic work, spread already willing legs so a billionaire could settle between them. Strong, though thin thighs pressed against his ribs, calves hooking over his spine to hold him in place.

“Honestly,” Tony said, rubbing his hands up and down Stephen’s waist and stomach, slowly undoing the buttons. Soft, pale flesh was bared beneath his touch and he leaned down, resting his chin on moonlight and grinning as fingers combed through his hair. “How mad do you think Rhodey will be?”

A hum vibrated through Stephen’s chest and those long, bony fingers tightened their hold and pulled, dragging their bodies together until their lips breathed the same air and Tony could see the small ghost of freckles. Blue eyes were like the water of white sand beaches, like succulents in small glass jars, like the ice on Lake Baikal in Russia that was so clear that it reflected light in turquoise. They seemed to change depending on the lighting, depending upon how their owner felt, depending on how many times a four year old misspelled Mississippi.

“I guess we’ll find out,” Stephen breathed.

Tony kissed him.

oOo

The phone started ringing in chorus to Stephen’s desperately muffled whines and pants, buzzing on the leather couch. Las Vegas and Caesar’s Palace had been left behind and the plane was on its way back to California and Malibu and a bed with silk sheets that wouldn’t mind being used for hours.

Tony pushed the phone off onto the plush carpet that was a godsend on his knees. Not that he really noticed with pale legs wrapped around his hips and Stephen’s chorused grunts of ‘ _Mmh, mmh, mmh_ —’ that mingled with the clouds and stars they passed through.

Kiss swollen lips were covered by a neurosurgeon’s fingers, blue eyes were half lidded and rolling back after every deep thrust.

“We’re alone,” Tony kissed the words along rose petal skin and dragged a hand over a hip, up ribs, and counted them with tap-tap-tapping fingers. “Let me hear you, Stephen?” He phrased it as a question and let a slow drag pull vertebrae into an arch like a puppet’s string.

“It’s—oh _fuck!_ ” Stephen reached out, pawing uselessly at bronze skin. “It’s fucking—hnngg—fucking embarrassing— _Tony!_ ” He held onto shoulders and panted, sweat beading across his forehead, sticking his black hair in soft curls like a curtain of night across the moon. Skin stuck to leather, hands lifted legs, and there was Doctor Strange, malleable and limp and completely at a mechanic’s mercy.

“It is _not_ ,” Tony promised and followed it with a long groan as nails dug in.

Stephen’s body _burned_. Burned like Tony was a forest and there was this man who was the most dangerous of wildfires, cleansing him of the old to bring in new. He could open the door to the cabin and shout about his need to the stars, could drag their love into the ocean and make mermaids jealous of its beauty.

Those hands fluttered elsewhere, their touch a thousand butterflies with the faint sting of nail-shaped wasps.

Another sharp thrust had Stephen crying out, his neck stretched and bare and open for teeth and lips. “You like that?” Tony breathed into black hair, doing it again.

Hands finally rested around his shoulders, a palm pressing against his spine. “Uh huh,” Stephen’s breath hitched at the slow drag out, just enough to warn of the desperate choked ‘ _please, please, oh God_ ’ when Tony leaned back, held those hips, and started to _fuck_.

Better than any award ceremony. Better than gambling. Better than alcohol.

 _Fuck, if I could just keep you forever_ , Tony thought and dragged Stephen’s lips to his own.

oOo

JARVIS opened the blinds at five in the morning, just in time for Tony—who had barely gotten any sleep anyway—to watch the dawn trace its fingers across Stephen’s canvas back. Dark red sheets, almost the shade of blood, were bunched at those bruise patterned hips. A small, sleepy groan left still swollen lips and long arms reached up to pull the pillow closer. Black hair spread out like an ink splatter, dusky eyelashes fluttered.

Tony leaned forward, kissed the topmost vertebrae, and then snuck to the shower.

“Jarvis?” Running shampoo through his hair, Tony could see from the open door as Stephen reached across the mattress—reached for _him_. “When’s Stephen’s flight?”

“8:20 am, sir.” The volume for the AI was turned down low enough it didn’t quite echo through the bathroom.

Tilting his head back, Tony looked at the marble ceiling, tracing lines of rose gold in white stone and frowned. “His award ceremony is tonight, isn’t it?”

“Indeed, sir.”

Tony reached for the soap. “Think I can make it in time?”

“You, sir?” the AI said, just a tint of sarcasm frosting the words. “I suppose anything is possible.”

oOo

Tony wished for a lot of things later on.

He wished he could undo the harm his weapons had done to so many innocents.

Wished Yinsen had lived.

And he wished he had spent the morning waking Stephen under the dawn. Wished he had watched the man rise with the sun. Wished he could see that back arch like the horizon.

Wished.

Wished.

 _Wished_.

(But the shooting star had already passed by.)

oOo

Across the nation, Stephen Strange was driving to an award ceremony—what would have been the first of many in some alternate timeline where he was a different person, meeting different people, going different places—when he received a call from Pepper Potts.

One hand on the wheel, one hand one his phone, she told him what had happened.

_Tony was captured by terrorists._

_Missing._

_We don’t know if he’s alive._

_I’m so sorry, Stephen._

He didn’t see the taillight until it was too late.

oOo

Tony Stark woke up with a battery in his chest.

Six thousand two hundred seventy-eight miles away, Stephen Strange woke up with rods in his fingers.

oOo

“ _Stephen_ ,” Pepper’s voice was distorted over the phone, the worry in her voice sounding harsher, rawer than he had ever heard it. It was coming over the speaker and the nurse had turned away, giving them the illusion of privacy. A picture of sunflowers was on the wall, sun poured through the windows.

He hated all of it.

 “ _Let me know if I can do anything, alright?_ ”

Stephen opened his mouth to say something about her already finding the best doctors, about her taking care of the medical bills, about her paying the rent for his apartment and finding someone to look after it while he healed.

All while searching for Tony.

But Stephen didn’t say any of that. Instead he managed and breathy, choked “Thank you” and couldn’t find the words to say any more.

 “ _Take care of yourself, Stephen_.”

There were no promises he could make regarding that. Not while Tony was out there. Not while there was no proof of him dead.

“You too,” Stephen said, staring down at his swollen, bandaged hands. She hung up after a moment and the nurse turned the phone off and left the room. All that time at school. His promise to Donna, his promise to _Tony_.

And it was ruined because he had been too much of a dumbass to pull over.

oOo

There was a battery in his chest. A damn fucking car battery carved into his fucking sternum and Tony lay on a bed made of nothing on the floor of a cave in rats-ass nowhere Afghanistan. People moved outside the heavy, steel door and Yinsen slept on another, smaller nest of blankets.

It smelled of gunpowder, it smelled of sweat, and it smelled like wishes shattered.

Tony rolled over—towards the battery that mocked him with his dependence—and closed his eyes.

In the chill of the cave, he thought of that last night in Malibu, of Stephen on him, spent and drowsy, smiling up from his chest with his hair in his eyes.

 _“Do you think I can donate the award to charity?”_ Tony had said as the waves of the ocean matched their deep, gentle breathing. He was rewarded by Stephen huffing a quiet laugh and rolling over to his own side of the bed. Moonlight touched his skin, highlighting the slim muscles of his chest and the dip of his stomach. _“Seriously—what use would I have for it?”_

 _“Scratch your name off it,”_ Stephen’s voice had been dry even as his eyes twinkled like the stars behind his head. _“Give it to me.”_

Tony’s gasp had been dramatically horrified and he turned, pinning the other man to the mattress and cherished the laugh that rose through the thin chest. _“Naughty boy,”_ he’d said. _“You have to deserve it.”_

With a toss of his head, Stephen had looked up with a small smirk, his eyes half lidded and framed by dark hair. The moon was a hunter, Tony had read someplace, and he didn’t mind being prey when the predator looked like _that_.

 _“Extemporary service_ , _”_ Stephen had murmured, stretching his arms up until his fingers brushed the headboard. _“I think I could do that.”_

Tony fell asleep to his own phantom laughter.

oOo

There was no second surgery. Nothing but desperate, broken physical therapy where he tried and tried and tried again—

Stephen was a good doctor, but he was a young one. Just making a name for himself when all of it was torn from grasping, hungry fingers.

He had climbed fast and hard and then had fallen just as swiftly.

And no one would remember the name Stephen Strange.

oOo

An arc reactor was built in a cave from nothing but spare parts. It was a patchwork thing, a desperate thing, and he knew it was the only way.

Tony was a good engineer, but he was tired. He made a name for himself making weapons only to find out they guzzled down more blood than he could have ever imagined.

That mountain that his family had built crumbled beneath his feet.

And everyone would remember the name Tony Stark.

oOo

Some awards ceremony was painted out of dripping watercolours in a hotel that looked over a Sicilian beach. Stephen had been invited by a professor to ‘get his foot in the door’ and had followed her around like some puppy, greeting those she introduced him to, staying back when she didn’t. A constant tug of war of kissing ass and becoming a shadow.

By the time she asked him to fetch her sixth martini, Stephen was ready to go back to his room and sleep.

He leaned over the counter, elbows on the wood, eyes staring at his warped reflected on the carefully waxed surface. Towering planted trees stretched close to the ceiling, round tables with groups of laughing people were cluttered with plates still being cleaned up by the wait staff. A long screen played a slideshow of whatever the hell they were there for and Stephen.

Stephen saw the martini be placed in front of his nose and the bartender left to tend to a different patron. His professor was drunk enough she probably wouldn’t notice if he drank it.

Or if he left.

“Well, kid, if you don’t want it I’ll have it.”

Stephen didn’t pick himself up from the bar, but he did look over at the man who had decided to lean against counter. Brown hair was combed back (and it looked thick. Thick enough to drown his fingers) and facial hair meticulously trimmed. A pair of dark red sunglasses sat on his nose, black suit over a crimson vest and gold tie. Not being able to tell the difference between a rented tux and a god damn city bus, Stephen assumed it probably cost the same amount he was currently trying to pay off in student loans.

“Sure,” he said, and pushed the martini over.

The man waited for it to stop, picked up the glass, and sniffed. “Didn’t do anything to it, did you?”

Stephen shook his head and looked back over the crowd. He couldn’t see his professor. Damn it. Something heavy shifted over his skin and he glanced back at the man who had finished the sugared orchid.

Dark eyes—the colour of leather in antique cars—slid over Stephen’s thin body like someone was pouring fondue across his back.

“Can I help you?” Stephen said.

The martini was drained, the glass placed to the side.

“Maybe,” said the man.

Stephen woke to the sun rising over the edge of Manhattan, turned over, and buried his face in his pillow as if that would help him catch the dream that fluttered away like a butterfly.

oOo

“Weapons,” a man made of wires and gears stood by the carved, mahogany bar. He was a young thing—fresh faced but tired of all the prattling on—with a softened jaw and gently curled black hair. Kid knew how to order a martini, though.

Tony hadn’t said anything, had left his name tag in his first glass of wine, but the shimmering, sea-glass eyes didn’t spark with recognition; just annoyance at being disturbed.

“All this is about weapons?” There was a twist to the words, like a rattlesnake’s tail.

“You don’t approve?”

Those bright eyes pierced through Tony, bypassing his ribs to settle over his lungs. “No one should get an award for killing people.”

Hot damn. That foot stomped down with all the finesse of a drunken redneck. Tony hid his wince by trying to get the attention of the bartender before realizing he had no idea what the kid had gotten. “What’d you get, again?”

Lips pursed in a frown and then opened once the bartender was there. Italian slid over that uppercut tongue as if it had always meant to exist on it. Tony missed it when the words switched back to English. “It’s a white cosmopolitan martini,” the man said, as the drink was placed between them. Two long fingers gently pulled the sugared petal out of the alcohol and placed it on a tongue.

Tony grabbed the martini and took a sip, looking anywhere but those lips and that fucking god damn _tongue_.

“Enjoy your glorified murder,” the man said once the sugar had dissolved and he had swallowed. That tall body pushed away from the bar, moving like some deep sea predator science hadn’t unveiled yet.

Those long legs clothed in tight pants were currently heading towards the elevator and, beyond, the rooms.

“ _Fuck_ ,” Tony said, downed the drink in a gulp, and took off after him.

In a cave, brown eyes opened as glass clinked against the waxed counter of the bar.

oOo

“And what am I without them?” Stephen snapped, turning on his heel, eyes blazing. “I am a _doctor_. I spent—spent countless _years_ trying to make a name from myself and now look at me!” He had the unbearable urge to push the table away, to knock it over, to use his broken, useless hands to shove it all to the floor. “I’m _nothing_.”

“No,” Pepper said, her voice sharp. “You are Stephen Strange. You are your own person, your own man. Tony had nothing to do with that.” Her inhale was bitter, harsh, and seemed to pierce through the apartment. “You may not be able to operate again, but you are still _you_.” She turned to head out the door. “It’s time you remembered that.”

oOo

“Do you have anyone, Mr. Stark?”

Tony looked up from their makeshift board game with nothing but screws and nails for pieces. “What?” He took the dice that were offered, placed them in the cup, and let them rattle like a warning from a viper.

“Anyone at home?”

Tony looked away, a slight curl to his lips, and he tried to think of Stephen, tried to think of his shifting eyes, his mischievous smirk, his deep laugh. But there was only the softened, television blurred out image of a face and a voice that fluctuated too much to be true.

“Yeah,” he said softly.

“Ah,” Yinsen said, leaning back.

Wiping his nose on the sleeve of his stained shirt, Tony tossed the dice.

oOo

Five months and seven days after the car accident, Stephen found a man who had broken his spine and could walk.

oOo

Five months and seven days after he was captured, Tony tested the leg to his robotic suit and grinned when it worked.

oOo

At six months, Stephen Strange bought a one-way ticket to Nepal.

At six months, Tony Stark hit the sand of Afghanistan in an Iron Man suit.

 

* * *

 

Part Two:

my lord poseidon,

will you have pity on the drowned?

 

Tony woke to the roar of a plane engine and a deep ache that went through the muscles in his back, digging into the marrow of his bones. There was a bed beneath him—not a pile of blankets but an actual mattress—and there was a strange emotion welling up in his gut—a mix of surprise, of bitterness, of itchiness that he couldn’t quite get rid of.

It was a soft thing. Squishy. Squeaked when he moved.

Damn thing was driving him nuts.

Groaning, Tony sat up, rubbed at his forehead, and swung his legs over the side of the bed. There wasn’t a whole lot besides the cot, the wheelchair, and the air force personnel. Counting everything on the walls had gotten boring enough that it was the reason he had fallen asleep in the first place.

“A good four hours,” Rhodey spoke up from his left. He didn’t look away from his book, but Tony already knew the other man was watching him out of the corner of his eye. “I didn’t know you could sleep that long.”

“Ha,” Tony said, rubbing one hand down his face. The bandages under his shirt pulled at his skin. He fought the urge to rip it all off and scream. “How much longer?”

“Not more than an hour,” Rhodey turned a page to keep up appearances, but both knew he wasn’t actually reading at that point—his eyes weren’t moving over the lines. “Pepper and Happy will be meeting us there.”

 _Pepper and Happy_.

“And,” Tony started, stopped, took a deep breath. “And Stephen?”

Rhodey’s shoulders stiffened and his knuckles turned white from the grip he had on the book. It was making the binding bend, crinkled the pages. “Tony—”

That was not the voice of a man with good news. Not the voice of a man who could say ‘he was in surgery and will be there as soon as he can’.

“No,” Shaking his head, Tony tried to stand and stumbled, falling back against the bed. His chest was heaving with each desperate inhale, hands twitching and pulling at seams and the sling and his own scabs. Each heart beat roared in his ears.

Thoughts sparked like a disarrayed circuit board and words and numbers spun and spun and _spun_. “No, no—”

The book hit the floor of the plane with a clang and Rhodey scrambled to his feet, reaching out to steady but not quite sure which flesh was bruised and which wasn’t. Eventually, he decided on the shoulders, damn what injuries were there, and forced brown eyes to meet his own.

“Tony,” Rhodey said, voice a bark as if he was commanding an officer rather than speaking to his friend. “ _Tony_ , you have to calm down, alright? Breathe with me—” he inhaled and made sure that Tony copied it before exhaling again. Inhale, exhale. Breathe, breathe, _breathe_. “That’s it.”

The plane shook.

Tony sat on the cot, head in his hands, shoulders shaking. The mattress squeaked under his weight and the urge to fling it across the room burned down his back. He could ignore this. He could, he could.

Deep breaths.

There was Rhodey, his touch carefully gentle, eyes dark and burning and an anchor in the sea for Tony to steady himself.

The words didn’t come for a while—there wasn’t a lot of space next to the frantically beating heart and the dull throbbing of his lungs.

“Rhodey,” Tony said. “Where’s Stephen?”

oOo

Kathmandu was unlike any city Stephen had ever been in before. America was full of strange order, of rules and steel and sharp corners. Everything was so damn _new_ in America.

In the heart of Nepal, in the never ending sea of buildings, Stephen was lost. People pressed together so their skin touched, that their clothes mixed, walked and talked and bought and sold together. Fabrics hung from store fronts, people on motorcycles wove in and out of shoppers, and walls were covered with papers whose ink had been dulled by sun and rain. Among everything there was a sense that he was stepping through a timeline, passing short, less than seven story buildings and ancient temples on the same street. A woman in black leathers, hair dyed pink, was shoulder to shoulder with a monk as they chattered and pointed at various fruits and vegetables.

 _Kamar-Taj_.

Stephen walked.

He walked past store fronts and temples, over bridges and roads with nothing but his backpack. By the third day, his feet were blistered and battered by the old, hole-filled tennis shoes that flopped clownishly on his feet.

By the fourth, his ankles were bleeding, rubbed raw by plastic and torn canvas.

A shirt ripped under Stephen’s teeth, tearing easily into strips of cotton. His fingers shook as he wrapped them, trembled as he tied them. The rest were rolled and placed in the backpack and, with a sigh, he got up to walk again.

And almost tripped over a dog.

The poor thing lurched to its feet with a yelp and Stephen stumbled, trying to regain his balance, shoulder knocking into the wall.

“Oh, shit, _shit_ —”

He steadied himself, legs aching, and wiped his arm over his forehead.

Dog was a nicer thing to call it than a mop with legs—one of which had dark, matted fur and was folded up, closer to the thin body.

“Hey,” Stephen said, his voice low. Ignoring the throbbing of his feet, he kneeled. “Hey,” wiggling his fingers, ignoring the wraps around them, he looked over the dog, “Here, boy.”

A black nose reached out, brown eyes focused on the fingers, jerking back at every slight movement before leaning forward, allowing Stephen to run his hand over the mangy fur.

“That’s a good boy,” Stephen said, running his fingers over the strong muscles holding the ears, combing what tangles he could out of the fur. He reached for the leg after a moment, shrugged his backpack off his shoulders, and pulled one roll of the shirt he had just torn up out. A low whine had him murmuring gentle words and he wrapped the cut as gently but tightly as he could.

“There you go,” his voice was soft and he smoothed his hand over the canine’s cheek. A tongue greeted him, pink and wet, dragging over dirtied bandages and scarred fingers. “Look at us,” Stephen said, a smirk that was no more than rusted, twisted wire curling his lips. “What a pair, huh?”

The dog whined again and there was a little wag of its tail, a little nudge of a nose.

Someone spoke up behind him and Stephen lurched. The dog jerked away, running for the nearest alley and he winced, stumbling back to his feet. His ankles stung, the back of his shoes digging in.

A tug on the back of his shirt almost sent Stephen flailing back, his too long arms waving out. One hand slapped the edge of a wooden beam and sent spaghetti strips of fire up his wrists that wrapped around his thoughts, squeezing out air like pythons. A low, pained moan escaped his mouth and there was a tug on his collar, pulling his head down so he was face to face with a man that didn’t look like the softer faced people of Kathmandu.

“You,” a hand shoved Stephen back into the wall. “Are you English?”

There was a buzzing in Stephen’s hand that rose up his arm and seemed to cover his thoughts in a barbed wire duvet. “I’m... what?”

“ _English_ ,” the hand shoved him back again. Splinters dug into Stephen’s neck and he blinked. The sun was too bright.

“No, no I’m,” Stephen took a breath and almost gagged on the smell of tobacco. “American. I’m American.” His backpack was still on the ground and he sighed, leaning past the man in front of him to pick it up.

“You lost, American?”

He couldn’t place that damn _accent_.

Stephen folded his hand closer to his body once he had managed to shrug a strap over that shoulder. “Uh,” buzz, buzz, _buzz_. “I am, yeah—do you know where Kamar-Taj is?” A hand patted his shoulder and each of Stephen’s breaths were dragged through his mouth to ease the lightning in his veins and to clear the fog away from his thoughts.

Blinking, he squinted at the man—he wasn’t as tall as Stephen, but he was bulkier with cropped brown hair and spider-like black eyes. “Kamar-Taj?” The man said and leaned forward, that tobacco breath sinking into Stephen’s skin like oil on water. “Yeah, I know it.”

Frail hope bloomed like a lily in a tight chest. “Yeah?” Stephen stood up straighter. “Could you draw me a map? I can make my way from here—”

“It is a hard place to find,” the man’s voice dripped like venom and it sent rocks tumbling into Stephen’s stomach. “But I could take you there. For a price.”

 _There it was_.

“I don’t have any money.”

 Those beady, spider eyes looked up at him. “I wasn’t thinking about money.”

Stephen’s breath hitched and he tried to take a step back but there was the wall behind and the man ahead. “That’s alright,” he said, trying his hardest to keep his voice steady. “I’m sure I’ll find it eventually. Thank you for your help.”

“Eventually?” A thick arm blocked Stephen’s path and the man ignored the soft ‘ _let me go_ ’. “Wandering the streets forever, yeah? That’s what you want to do?”

 _No_ , Stephen thought, he didn’t, he didn’t, he—

A hand rested on his hip in this city where he didn’t know the people or the language or the culture.

Stephen closed his eyes.

oOo

A rug rubbed into Stephen’s back. It bit into his skin, caught his shoulder blades, scratched like tiny claws against his ribs. There was a body above him, panting against his cheek. Hands pawed at his hips, his thighs, his legs. Bruises already dotted his skin, burning just above muscles.

Blue eyes stared at the wall, watched woven fabric jerk as each hungry thrust ripped another piece of his soul away.

 _I’m sorry, Tony_.

Stephen closed his eyes, gritted his teeth, and let his voice drown in the depths of the sea.

_I’m sorry._

_I’m sorry._

_I’m sorry._

oOo

Stephen was dumped in front of a wooden door to a brick building. Dumped like a bag of garbage as the man laughed and laughed and _laughed_. There was a temple across from him with towering, black columns. It could have been Kamar-Taj.

Could have been, but he doubted it.

Shaking hands pressed against his face and Stephen struggled to breathe around the tightness welling in his throat and the bile that followed it. The vomit didn’t come, but the sobs shook his chest, pounding against his sternum until he bit down on his forearms to try and muffle the sounds. Blood trickled over his tongue. Bitter and metallic and heavy.

His skin felt too tight and too battered and too sticky and too everything and he wanted to claw off every inch of it with his nails until strips of it could be burned. Maybe then he’d be willing to put them back on. Maybe more would grow in their place.

Maybe the scars would last and last and _last_ and everyone would know what he’d done.

The backpack had been lost along the way but his passport and small amount of money were still sewn into his shirt and trousers.

Behind him, the door opened.

Stephen choked on the ‘ _sorry_ ’ that got stuck in his throat and tried to push himself away from the stairs so whoever it was could pass. The movement shot something that felt like a gallon of tar through his stomach and stabbed needles across his legs, so he stopped and just hoped the person would walk by and leave him in peace.

Someone in evergreen robes kneeled beside him. The fabric looked heavy--a mix between leathers and wools and anything else that could be found. Two dark hands pulled back the hood and there was a man.

A man whose eyes were like pine cones that had opened after a forest fire with a furrowed brow and a tight lipped frown. There was hardness there, but something soft as well. A willingness for growth despite what they had seen.

Stephen shook, his eyes wide, watching the man like a trapped deer. Blood roared in his ears, drowning out the sound of the street and the temple until there was just his fluttering heart and harsh, panting breaths.

He felt like the dog from before. The dog that had taken courage to let another broken being touch it.

But this man in green wasn’t a doctor with broken hands and Stephen wasn’t a dog with a cut leg.

When a hand reached out, he flinched hard enough to send his shoulder into brick.

Each breath shook through him, heavy in its solidness, ripping at the back of his throat until he was almost panting. The bile returned, sticky and bitter and clawing up the back of his throat. Stephen swallowed.

Palms were displayed. “I won’t hurt you,” the man said, his voice like secrets hidden in a well.

Pink rimmed eyes flickered between the hands and the face.

“My name is Mordo.”

 _Mordo_. Stephen let it settle on his tongue even as he didn’t speak.

oOo

“What do you mean ‘ _he’s missing_ ’?” Tony snarled even as Rhodey guided him (forcibly) into a wheelchair. “He’s six foot, skinny as hell, and light reflects off him he’s so damn _pale_ —”

Someone readjusted the sling holding his arm and were met with bared teeth and flashing eyes.

“We tried to get in contact with him,” Rhodey said, finishing Tony’s tie and then moving closer so the other man had no other choice but to be backed into the seat. “And when there was no answer we called his house keeper and,” he paused.

“ _And_?” Tony tapped his fingers against his thigh.

Rhodey scratched at his jaw and looked away. “She said he had left a couple of days ago without warning,” he admitted. “Packed a bag and left. Hasn’t used a credit card since.”

Tony licked his cracked, scabbed lips. He dug his nails into his thighs, breathed in what he could until it seemed like there couldn’t be enough air in the universe for his lungs. Stephen wouldn’t just leave. He wouldn’t just quit his job at the hospital.

“What happened, Rhodey?” Tony couldn’t look at Rhodey. He didn’t want to see what was written on the other man’s face. “What happened to Stephen?”

There was a soft sigh and a heavy hand landed on a trembling shoulder. With quiet words, Rhodey told the story of Stephen’s car accident, of his ruined hands, of his desperate attempts at physical therapy and begging to let him help find Tony.

But there was nothing Stephen Strange could do. Nothing that any of them could do.

Tony closed his eyes.

 _Oh, Stephen_.

“Where’s your phone,” he said. “I need to call someone.”

oOo

Happy and Pepper were there, just like Rhodey promised, and Tony stood before them with an imperial sniff for the crowd, wondering where the hell he could get a pair of sunglasses.

“Vacation’s over,” he said, “we got work to do.”

The car was the same leather, the same smell, and he groaned as it gave in just slightly underneath him. The air conditioning was like a battering ram compared to the varied, wild temperatures of Afghanistan but he breathed it in anyway.

“Take us to the hospital, Happy—”

“Hold off on that,” Tony said, tugging at the sling that pressed the collar of his shirt into his neck. It was too close to his neck, too close to him and he wanted to throw it into the ocean. “I _hate_ this thing—no, no I have a _list_ ,” he said.

Pepper leaned back, one leg crossed over the other. “A list.”

“Not a big list,” Tony promised, patting down his jacket and pants. Finding nothing, he sighed and pressed his palm against his chin, fingers creating a cage around his lips. “First, I need all the information we have about Stephen.”

Already having her Starkpad out, Pepper started typing across the screen. The car moved forward, Happy turning out to circle the airport until there was a set destination.

Warmth settled in Tony’s gut. He had missed them. Not this, not all of it, but he had missed _them_.

Pepper looked up expectantly when the silence lasted for too long.

“Day he left, what he took—doesn’t matter. _All of it_.” Tony looked out the window and watched California pass by. They didn’t say anything about his pause. Good. That was. It was good. “Second, press conference.”

“Is that wise?”

Was it? “Probably not,” Tony said, avoiding Pepper’s heavy gaze. “But I’m going to do something that should have been done a long time ago.”

There was the sound of cars passing, of the motor beneath the hood, and of Tony’s nails tap, tap, tapping on leather.

“Alright,” Pepper said, adding it to her pad. “What else?”

Tony dropped his twitching hands down to his lap. “A cheeseburger. Five cheeseburgers. _Many, many_ cheeseburgers. Bump that to the top. First priority. Get on it.”

“Yes, sir,” Happy said, turning away from the airport and pointing the car to the nearest Burger King.

oOo

Greasy paper bag and pair of sunglasses later, Tony looked out the window at the sculpture of the YF-22 and then past it to the numerous American flags lining the half-circle driveway. A crowd of people dressed in their business finest waited for him—what looked like most of the board, some of the employees he personally knew, and then a lot that he didn’t—Obadiah at the front. They were applauding as if it was some sort of theatre performance.

Tony finished off his second cheeseburger and took one of the napkins out of the bag to wipe his mouth.

“Ready?” He didn’t turn away from the door as Obadiah stepped forward to open it.

“Always,” Pepper said, already sliding out of her own seat to follow Happy as he passed her door.

Accepting the hug from Obadiah was easy, waving his hand to the reporters, just as easy, but when he sat down on the floor in front of the podium, tony looked over the mass of faces, pulled his fourth burger from his pocket (ignoring Stephen voice rising up around the sea of others, sounding amused in the controlled chaos as it said; ‘ _God, Tony, those are so bad for you_ ’), and tried not to pull at his sling.

 _I’m sorry, Stephen_ , Tony thought as he motioned for the reporters to take a seat.

oOo

“And that is why, effective immediately; I am shutting down the weapons manufacturing section of Stark International.”

oOo

“Well,” Pepper said once she and Happy had managed to get Tony past the ravenous reporters, his own employees, and into the car. She undid her pony tail, shook out her sunset orange hair, and combed her fingers through the ends. “I am glad you gave us a warning, at least.”

Tony winked and, when they were out of eyesight of everyone standing on the curb, slumped down in his seat. “Obadiah will be furious,” he said with a snicker.

“Yes,” Pepper nodded her head, that knowing smile on her lips. “Yes he will.”

She rested her hand on Tony’s thigh and he looked up.

“But Stephen,” he voice was soft, “would be _proud_.”

oOo

A bowl of water was brought to Stephen, the man in the green robes sitting beside him, watching as he drank with those heavy, dark eyes. Trembling fingers spilled half the liquid down his front and only a steadying, deep breath stopped the bowl from being thrown at the nearest wall.

Stephen managed to unmerge his tongue from where it had been soldered to the roof of his mouth and his throat didn’t burn when he swallowed. With a single nod of gratefulness, he offered the bowl back.

Mordo hadn’t attempted to touch him again, just moving in and out of the wooden door with small plates of food and water over the past few hours and sitting there on the stairs. He was a calm man, not speaking past a couple of words, and watched the street with an attentiveness that was more tiger than human.

Something inside Stephen curled in his stomach, weighing heavily but in a way that was almost soothing. He leaned against the brick with a sigh and looked up at the sky.

The sun was moving over the buildings, spilling shadows and light on the people below. Clothing on a line flapped in a breeze, pigeons settled on phone lines, and two women passed, arm in arm, laughing about something on a cell phone.

At some point he’d have to get up and walk. Have to continue looking for Kamar-Taj. But not right then. Not at that moment where every part of his body felt raw and the slightest failure would be salt and lemon rubbing over the opened flesh.

And Tony.

 _Tony_.

Stephen pulled his knees up, rested his cheek on them, breathed out slowly and closed his eyes. That ache in his stomach constricted around his torso. _Fuck_.

Beside him, Mordo stood in a flurry of robes, brushed off his pants, but didn’t leave. The pigeons took flight as a child on bike rode past.

“It would be better inside,” He said, tapping the wooden door with his knuckles. “You could rest.”

Stephen opened his eyes and looked up. _Rest_. His ankles protested as he moved his feet. _Rest sounded nice_. Mordo didn’t offer his hand and Stephen wouldn’t have taken it if he had, managing to get up with minimal winces and hitched breaths.

Inside was like being swallowed by a beast that had no end to it. Walls were made with crosshatched wood, sending small slivers of light over clay pots and vases that were probably older than the entirety of America. Floors creaked under weight, threatening to dump Stephen out if he so much as thought of misbehaving. He kept close to Mordo, determinedly out of the eyesight of anyone else as they went through numerous hallways, took too many turns, went up stairs and down stairs and around and around and _around_ —

Stephen fumbled over his feet, almost crashing into the wall and caught himself just in time. He looked up and there was Mordo, standing before an threshold with no door, motioning towards a wide open square room. There were people inside—some sitting on the floor, talking in quiet voices and a man reading a book.

“I must go talk to The Ancient One,” Mordo said, waving Stephen on so he was closer to the middle of the room. “Make yourself comfortable.”

Opening his mouth to say something—possibly to question what kind of person existed to be called ‘ _The Ancient One_ ’ but no sound escaped his lips and Stephen rubbed his hands on his ragged trousers and did his best to sit down. It was an awkward movement of limbs, soft, pained hisses, and trying not to use his hands but he managed to fold his legs and settle on the floor.

The soft sweetness of herbs and musk of wood mixed with the faint dryness of dust and clay. Leather creaked, cloth fluttered, people walked by talking in low murmurs. None of them spared him a glance.

A minute turned into ten which turned into thirty and the other people in the room shuffled, moving in and out in quiet patience. Each blink was a dangerous game of trying to remember that his eyes should be open (it was a game he was losing if any of the times he had to jerk his eyelids apart were any indication) and Stephen rubbed one hand over his face.

When he looked up, there was Mordo in his green robes, hands behind his back, looking faintly amused. A few steps ahead of him, closer to Stephen, with her hands clasped in front of her, a small smile on her lips, was a woman in egg-white robes. Everyone else had seemed to string their clothing together out of whatever they could have sewn but _she_ —

If clothing was power, she was a queen.

Her head was barren, shaved clean and revealing a strange crossing of scars that normally would have been hidden by hair.

“Mordo tells me you can’t speak,” she said.

Stephen opened his mouth as if to prove her wrong, but there were no words gathering in the back of his throat and they fled every time he tried to reach for them. He bowed his head and looked down at the twitching, trembling hands in his lap.

She hummed and kneeled, thick fabric falling around her and dragging along Stephen’s tattered, stained trousers. His gaze followed the path one corner took along his calf. Palms cupped beneath his chin, tightening against his jaw when he tried to flinch away like vet and a dog. He stared up at her, this lost sheepdog desperate and searching for something. Thumbs rubbed against his cheeks, firm, but gentle, as slate blue eyes bore into his.

The woman stripped away his skin and muscles until there was nothing but bones and it was like a conversation of human history compressed to that one moment and a single burning question:

Would she take his life? Or would she save it?

Her hands left. Stephen took a deep breath as if his lungs had been switched off and back on.

“Mordo will take you to one of the rooms. Your training will begin in the morning.”

 _Training?_ He tried to scramble to his feet and felt the scabs on his ankles tear apart. With bleary, blinking eyes, he watched his blood drip down to the floor and realized his shoes were missing. _Jesus Christ_.

“Come,” Mordo’s hand hovered over his arm and he motioned back to the hallways. “You can bathe and I will find you some new clothing.”

oOo

Tony looked up at Pepper. He thought of Stephen who was still missing despite Jarvis’ best efforts to track him down (they found his image in the Los Angeles airport before he vanished) and Rhodey’s determined silence after the press conference. “I don’t have anyone else,” he told her with a small quirk of his lips and a half hearted shrug. She rested her palm on his shoulder, tapped her fingers against the skin, and reached for the old arc reactor.

“What do you want me to do with this?”

“Get rid of it.”

oOo

Six in the morning was almost too early to be up. The sun was still below the horizon; sometime during his time in Afghanistan, California had gone from summer to winter and it was still wreaking havoc on his internal clocks. But that’s how time passed and Tony settled in his lab, legs on the table, not waking his computer just yet. DUM-E and U were powered down in the corner, the windows were dim leaving almost complete darkness except for the smaller lights on the edges of the garage and the glow coming from Tony’s phone.

He had one hand tucked under his chin, a small smile filled with dandelion fondness turned up his lips, and brown eyes had softened with such fondness that love dripped from the irises, smoothing the tension of his face. The wrinkles were eased and his posture was limp except for where he knees knocked, almost bumping each other before parting again.

 _“I can’t have a dog!”_ Stephen was laughing, coming in and out of focus of the camera. His dark hair was ruffled, eyes like starlight. His words settled on skin, warm and digging deep to rip that weed that had been growing in Afghanistan, ripping it out to plant themselves. It was deeper than Tony remembered. Deeper, kinder, and so full of love it seemed like Stephen was a fountain of it. _“They require so much attention—I wouldn’t be able to take care of it.”_

 _“Alright,”_ Tony heard his own voice, on the verge of gentle teasing and fruit punch amusement. _“What about a cat?”_

Stephen’s laugh tapped across Tony’s chest, drawing a hitched breath from his lungs and stubborn tears to his eyes. He didn’t wipe them away, too enchanted by the man on the screen. _“Tony,”_ Stephen’s expression was soft like a fur carpet by a fire, _“I don’t need a cat either, I promise.”_

Tony watched as his hand reached out, fingers brushing over a cheekbone and he swallowed as Stephen closed his eyes, and leaned into the touch. _“I just,”_ he heard the hesitation in his own voice, the small breath he had to take to drag that courage, kicking and screaming out of the hole it had crawled into. _“I just don’t want you to be alone.”_

Those bright eyes opened slowly, not looking directly at the camera, not quite, but it was close enough that it felt as if that tender affection fell on Tony like a quilt. Stephen wrapped one hand around the wrist so close to his face and turned his head, dragged his lips against the heel of the palm cupping his jaw.

The video stopped there, just before the response could come. Tony took a trembling breath in the dark, set his phone on the desk, and wiped a hand over his eyes.

“Jarvis,” he said, “You up?”

_“For you, sir? Always.”_

oOo

Plants hung through open windows, reaching for him like helpful hands, as birds chirruped their own little songs. Sunlight sent scurrying shadows over his feet and Stephen could almost— _almost—_ pretend that the dark marks along his hips and thighs were just remnants of that. Just shadows. Just dirt. Just _filth_.

Water pounded into a curved spine, fell over pale, shivering shoulders, and tapped along the back of his neck. Wet bangs easily hung over his eyes, longer than he remembered, and stuck to his forehead and nose. Small rivers of grime dripped around his feet, brown and red swirling down the drain. Stephen watched with glazed, dispassionate eyes as small scrapes and cuts and rubbed-raw-skin was revealed. He hadn’t noticed—hadn’t felt them—and wondered what other parts of his body ached that had been numbed by the emotional aesthetic coursing through his body.

Mordo had given him a bar of orange smelling soap and a bottle of what could have been shampoo. He let them sit on the small, iron shelf that hung from the showerhead and rested his forehead against cold stone. A low sigh came from his toes, up his legs, through his stomach, gathered all the tightness in his chest, and finally dripped past his lips. The tension didn’t leave his body, but the exhaustion returned.

He reached for the soap.

The first touch to skin was slow and he lathered bubbles over his arms, careful with his hold so he didn’t drop the bar. It nipped and kissed at the raw parts of his body, but that faded gradually and the cheerful, bright smell of citrus settled in Stephen’s nose.

And he scrubbed.

And scrubbed.

And _scrubbed_.

His body was a bruised moon, suspended in space and no longer his own.

The bar slipped through fingers when he pressed too hard against his hip and Stephen cursed, scrambling to grab the soap as something burned along his waist and his sides and his back. Each breath tore through him in desperate, panicked pants and he gave up on the soap, dragging his nails along his skin until there was just long, thin, pink scratches standing out along his pale flesh.

He gagged on oranges and buried his hands in his hair, staring down as his feet. The water pounded against him, the sunlight a physical weight on his flesh, and the plants rustled in stiff, mocking laughter. That touch was on his skin. It was there it was there it was—

Stephen dove for the soap and almost tripped over his own wobbling legs. Under his desperate palm, the bar grew misshapen and crushed. He stumbled back, hitting the wall and stared down at the Sanskrit character carved onto the top.

God. _God._

Crackling hot rage settled in his stomach. It burned against his chest and he wanted to rip his own heart out of his ribs and slam it against the wall, tear it to shreds with his teeth.

What did _he_ have to sniffle about? He _agreed_. He said _yes_. He should have told the man to go fuck himself, to go rot in the trash, to go—to go—

A tidal wave sob ripped through his and Stephen choked on it. Something salty was on the edge of his lips and he closed his eyes, turning his face up to the water as it brushed away the heat under his eyelids.

The rage simmered and broke like glass, sharpened and digging into each vulnerable bit of flesh.

He wanted—

He wanted—

He wanted _Tony_.

(He didn’t deserve him.)

 

* * *

 

Part Three:

the goddess of life knows the pain of loss

the queen of the dead knows the power of love

which one would you choose to care for your soul?

(hint: they’re the same woman)

 

Energy buzzed under Tony’s skin like a hive of bees. It urged him to think, to move, to _build_. It was an energy that he thought had left him but, it turned out, there just needed to be something new. Something _better_.

Pen in hand, he drew in the air, creating a more streamline blueprint than the ones that had been used in the cave in Afghanistan. Something more sleek rather than a junkyard made of parts.

“It better be important,” he told Pepper as she unlocked the door, ducking into the workshop with a mug of tea and rolled up newspaper.

“I’m not here to interrupt you,” she said, not even bothering to turn his music down and shouting above it instead. Jarvis, the traitor, turned it down for her. “I have the papers for the arc reactor team for your approval,” they were placed on one of the cluttered table tops. “And there’s numerous calls wanting an interview.”

Tony turned away with a groan. “No,” he said, “no, I’m busy.”

Humming, Pepper looked as though she was making a note of it. “Shall I tell everyone that you don’t want to be disturbed?”

“Perfect. Yes. Do that.”

oOo

Freshly showered and having changed into the white and grey robes Mordo had placed out, Stephen settled on the floor of the room he had first been brought to. His feet were still bare, but he didn’t mind so much with the fresh bandages that had been wrapped around his ankles and hands. Everything felt sluggish after his breakdown in the shower—his body was filled with cotton, his bones made of lead. A year of sleep might do him some good. Maybe two.

Borrowing one of the cushions from one of the shelves, Stephen sat down unhurriedly in front of The Ancient One and watched as she made small tea bags of dried plants and placed them small, clay cups.

“From the sight of your hands,” she said, the kettle clinking as she moved it, “asking you to write your name might be a useless endeavour.”

Stephen stared down at the pale scars and looked away.

“No matter,” her voice was light, drifting through the room but never beyond. “There are other ways to speak without using your voice. I will have Wong, our librarian, find books about sign language for you.” She looked him over once more. “Until there comes a time where you can tell us your name, shall we come up with a new one?”

Stephen looked up from under his shaggy bangs.

The Ancient One set the cups out, pouring water over the teabags, humming as she got lost in her own thoughts. People moved through the hallways, their voices quiet and unable to echo. It made everything seem more still, more hushed. Stephen breathed in the warm, fruity smell of the tea. Outside, the city moved on in its own, separate reality. If he listened hard enough, he could make out chatter of animals and people.

“Madra,” The Ancient One said, offering him a cup. “I think I would like to call you Madra.”

Stephen blinked, taking the cup in both hands and winced as the liquid bounced and rippled. He shrugged one shoulder. Took a sip of the hot liquid and let it settle in his stomach. There was something wrong with his head—it was like someone hadn’t finished screwing it back on.

“Madra it is, then.”

He finished his tea and she took the cup, setting it all aside before settling in front of him once more.

“Do you know where you are?”

Stephen shook his head.

The Ancient One adjusted her robes so they laid around her in an almost sun-light pattern. She motioned to the walls. “This is Kamar-Taj.”

Kamar-Taj. It hit like a punch to the stomach.

“You _have_ heard of this place.”

Stephen wanted to tell her how he searched Kathmandu for days, how he begged and bartered and ran away from everything he knew. How he gave up a piece of himself in a desperate attempt to get back what he used to have.  But none of the words came, so he sat in silence.

Watching him with that sharp gaze, The Ancient One seemed to read the weather patterns of the hurricanes in his eyes and the universe in his soul. “Interesting,” she murmured. “Do you know what we do here?”

Shaking his head, Stephen settled down on the cushion.

Around him, reality crumbled. 

oOo

“The language of the mystic arts is as old as civilization. The sorcerers of antiquity called the use of this language ‘spells’. We harness energy drawn from other dimensions of the mutliverse to cast spells, to conjure shields and weapons.

“To make _magic_.”

oOo

The acidic smell of the soldering iron, heated copper, and oil filled the lap, drifting lazily around Tony as he leaned over the unnecessary magnifying glass. His brow was furrowed, his eyes wandering over the huffing hydraulics system that was meant to keep machinery cool. Attaching the circuit board was easy, but something was causing the boot to open and close randomly.

Behind him, A couple of screens were focused on blueprints, another with 80’s rock music that was low enough to not be obnoxious, and the last scanning through hundreds upon thousands of cameras all around the world. All calls—except for ones from Pepper—were redirected towards his answering machine.

“DUM-E,” Tony said to the robot, “grab me a Philips head.”

oOo

“How is he doing?” The Ancient One stopped by the entry way to the mediation room, her eyes on the lone figure sitting on the floor. No incense burned, no instruments were being played. There was just the sunlight drifting through the walls and the quiet rustle of plants playing in the wind. “And has he told you his name?”

Mordo has his hands clasped behind his back. “He has trouble writing so we are trying to find an easier way for him to communicate.”

The Ancient One tilted her head, still watching the novice. She smiled and entered the room, footsteps almost silent against the floor. “Madra,” she called, “it is time for breakfast.”

He didn’t respond.

Motioning Mordo to join her, The Ancient One stood in front of her newest student, unbridled glee blooming across her features. She tapped her fingers against each other and looked like a cat ready to pounce on a toy. “Look at that,” she whispered when her disciple was close enough.

Stopping at her side, Mordo sighed.

Their newest student had his head tilted forward, eyes closed, mouth dropping ever so slightly open. He wasn’t drooling. Not yet.

“Oi!” Mordo clapped his hands. “Wake up!”

oOo

Dumping a banana and some strawberries into his blender, Tony glanced over at Pepper. She was partially curled up on the couch, laptop sitting on the coffee table, StarkPad in her lap. Her bright hair was pulled in a messy ponytail, her phone on her thigh, and there were subtle bags under her eyes. A mug of steaming coffee was in hands reach though she hadn’t made a grab for it just yet.

“Obadiah keeps calling,” she said, “and I just keep letting him know you aren’t going to change your mind.”

Tony placed the lid on the blender. “That’s my girl,” he said and turned it on.

She looked up at him under her bangs before turning back to the Listtm. It only took a moment for the jumble of fruits, vegetables, and yogurt to become a yellowish-pink mess and when Tony turned the blender off, she spoke again. “There’s been little news on the Stephen front,” Pepper stared down at the screen in front of her. “I’m sorry.”

Rubbing a hand over his face, Tony sighed. “No,” he said, “That’s fine, that’s not your fault. Missing people take time to locate.” He poured a generous cup for himself and put the rest in a container to drink later. “You should get some sleep.”

She hummed.

“No, I’m serious; if I’m getting more sleep than you, we have a problem.”

Her laughter bubbled through the room. “Alright, alright.” Pepper put the StarkPad on the coffee table and shut her computer. “But if your company explodes, I’m jumping ship.”

“If my company explodes without you there,” Tony called after her as she made her way to the guest room that had been officially labelled as _Pepper Pott’s_ a few years back, “then every single one of them deserve to be fired!”

oOo

“It’s not about the motions,” Mordo said, Standing to Stephen’s left and slowing his hand movements so the other man could copy them, “it’s about the will, your _want_. Think of the motions like a wand; not always necessary, but easier to control the energy you’re using.”

Around them, the courtyard was empty, the sun just beginning to rise over the horizon and spilling golden light across wood and stone. Someone had made Stephen a pair of leather shoes to keep his feet warm and had lined them with some type of animal fur. His robes were grey and thin so he added more and more layers until fabric tightened around his shoulders.

Grunting in the back of his throat, Stephen turned so he and his teacher were face to face. His hands throbbed as he bent his fingers but he lined his arms up so they were equal with Mordo’s. They went through the motions again, this time with the student acting more as a reflection.

The sun rose higher and Stephen’s hands began to cramp, his movements sloppy, his brow beaded with sweat as he gritted his hands against the pain.

“That’s enough for now,” Mordo said. “We’ll resume after lunch.”

Stephen fought the urge to bite his fingers off one by one as small bits of buzzing flames shot through them and into his wrists. He followed the emerald robes through Kamar-Taj and only perked up when he realized they were going down a set of stairs instead of up. There were more winding hallways, more rooms that he hadn’t had the chance to explore further and he took note of all of them while trying his best to keep up.

Stopping before a sliding door, Mordo glanced back at him before pushing it open.

Shelves of books were stacked quietly in rows and along walls. Round tables—most of them empty, for now—were spread throughout and small bits of golden light played along the edges of lights that seemed to have no actual bulb. There was leather and papyrus, scrolls and giant tomes.

Stephen followed Mordo, almost tripping over himself as he spun around, trying to take in everything.

“Good morning, Wong,” his teacher said, stopping in front of a desk.

The man behind it wore reddish brown leathers, his eyes dark and almost beady, and had a stern but not unwelcome face. “Mordo,” he greeted with a nod and turned to Stephen.

Stephen, who was currently looking over a stack of books and fighting the urge to touch.

“So,” Wong said, “this is the newest student.”

“The Ancient One is calling him Madra.”

Stephen met Wong’s gaze and wondered if the Library of Alexandria was buried in them. There was nothing malicious, nothing judging. They simply watched.

With a hum, librarian hands reached for a different stack of books—these ones newer, not made of leather and vellum but of laser printed paper—and placed them on the desk. “I found what I could,” Wong said, “but there are only so many ASL books on hand.”

Mordo nodded once and motioned his student forward, stepping aside so it as Stephen who would have to pick up the stack. “I’m sure the internet will help to fill in the blanks,” he said helping to carefully place books in Stephen’s shaking arms. His hands were throbbing already from their work out so they were used as little as possible, the pressure rubbing on bones and rods and scar-flesh. “Thank you, Wong.”

Wong inclined his head, still watching them. With a small smile, Stephen tried to portray his own gratitude on his face.

It seemed to work, because those rough, harsh features  softened.

“You’re welcome,” Wong said.

oOo

“Gonna start off nice and easy,” Tony told his robots, shifting his weight on the launch pad and feeling how the boots leaned with his movements. “See if ten-percent thrust capacity can achieve lift.” He bent his knees, braced his legs, and took a deep breath.

“Three, two, one—”

He shot over the work station, feet flying up over his head, and slammed into the concrete ceiling of his house.

DUM-E, in a burst of helpfulness, bathed him with the fire extinguisher.

oOo

Another morning of failure. Another morning of wasted time.

Sweat dripped down Stephen’s brow and he fought the urge to wipe his arm across his face. Beside him, The Ancient One looked like she had been sculptured from the earth itself, beige robes swaying gently against her thighs and calves, hands and arms high.

They’d been in the same position for over an hour and Stephen winced as his calf whined and bit at his knee. Each muscle in his back felt as if they were made of splinters and he tried to breathe through the ache.

“Breathe, Madra.”

He took a deep, gasping inhale.

“This is not a punishment,” she said, eyes on the mountains to the north. A breeze ruffled across them and Stephen almost sighed into the chill it brought with it. “What are you focusing on, right now?”

His legs, his back, his shoulders. Stephen fought the urge to push his bangs away from his face.

“What if you gave them everything what they wanted?”

Blinking sharply, Stephen pursed his lips and looked at The Ancient One. She was watching him from the corner of her eye.

“What would happen if you let go?”

It was some mystical nonsense, probably. Stephen looked down at his foot, watched it flex from side to side, trying to keep his weight balanced. His calf kept burning, his back kept hurting. So he let go.

Gravity dragged his ass to the ground and Stephen landed with a yelp. He stayed where his body had been dumped, arms across his stomach, legs shaking, and closed his eyes against the wide, blue sky. Each breath felt like it was being dragged down the back of his throat so he groaned and sat up to find some water.

A bottle sat next to him, placed on the ground between him and The Ancient One.

She was on the stone floor, sitting with her legs crossed, eyes closed and hands resting on her knees. Far below them, the city of Kathmandu moved on, but here, in this moment, there was a gentle type of peace.

Stephen popped the cap of the water bottle with his teeth, drank about half of it, and scooted forward. Each look was shy, checking, nothing more than a stray making sure they were welcome. He copied her pose, forced his straining back up straight again, and closed his eyes. Each heartbeat thrummed in a too-thin chest and flushed ears. Small tingles ran up and down twitching thighs, but Stephen breathed himself into that moment.

Beside him, The Ancient One opened one eye, glanced over, and smiled.

oOo

“A flight stabilizer, was it?” Pepper said, coming into the lab. She had tied her hair up in a high, twisted bun and sat down on one of the empty stools. A square package was in one hand, a cup of coffee in the other, and she placed the present in one of the more uncluttered areas. One leg folded over the other and she took a sip of the warm liquid. “He’s going to be suspicious.”

Tony grunted and tried to shove his tools back in the box he swore had been able to hold them all that morning.

“What’s it really for?”

“Do you actually wanna know?” he looked over his shoulder at her.

Tilting her head to the side, Pepper looked over him with a slight frown. “ _Is_ it a weapon?”

“No,” Tony managed to shut the lid. “Not really. It’s not _built_ to be a weapon.”

She sipped her tea. “Then I guess that it’s best if you don’t tell me.”

“Probably.”

oOo

“Some of the Masters are asking why you are spending so much time with him,” Mordo didn’t lean against the wall, not quite. He and The Ancient One were on the higher walkway—a perfect observatory for where one student followed the slow, water movement of Master Sol Rama. The new novice was a disciplined and fast learner, but he had still yet to manipulate the energy of the multiverse.

“Are they claiming favouritism?” The Ancient One rolled a fan in her palm and smiled as hands, new at communicating, tried to charade a question.

Mordo huffed, amusement clinging to his eyes and the way they rolled. “Of course they are,” he said.

“Tell them that if they give up before the slowest flower blooms that they might miss the most beautiful one of them all.”

The groan that rose up in Mordo’s chest was childish and full of exasperation. “Why don’t,” he said dryly, “I just tell them that the slowest students require the most attention?”

Leaning over the banister, her eyes on the two figures below, The Ancient One looked like a leopard in waiting. She tapped the fan against the wood and grinned as a staff whistled and parried a Master’s blow. “Tell them,” her voice was soft and there was a different kind of danger to it—something like a spark on kindling or the far away rumble of thunder. “That they are _fools_.”

oOo

Everything built looked like some mad scientist had decided to take over Tony Stark’s garage. Wires stuck out of his arc reactor, tubing circled his legs, and there was a manic energy that flowed through the building.

“Alright,” he said, standing on the launch pad, newly completed flight stabilizers strapped to each arm. “Alright, let’s do this.”

 _“Sir,”_ Jarvis said, already sounding too exhausted for an AI. _“While I admire your motivation, perhaps it would be best to get more data before attempting—”_

Tony laughed, the sound bright and as turbulent as a plane going through a hurricane. “Science is all about testing,” he almost sung, “and this is the easiest way to get results!”

Both boots and stabilizers proceeded to launch him halfway across the room and onto one of the tables. He slid over it, knocking wrenches, a soldering iron, and a stack of papers to the floor before he followed. Feet still on the table, Tony blinked up at the ceiling and groaned.

 _“You’re right, sir,”_ Jarvis said. _“That flight yielded excellent data.”_

oOo

Stephen looked up from his books and the borrowed laptop as Mordo sat down next to him. He had his own computer, had his own videos of ASL pulled up.

“What’s the point of you learning how to communicate,” he said, “if no one here can understand you?”

With tentative, jerking movements—half actual words, half spelled out—Stephen asked if Mordo was the only one. He had to repeat himself a couple of times, make the motions slower, but those dark eyes lit up with understanding.

Huffing a grumpy little scoff, Mordo rolled his eyes. “As if anyone here would pass up learning something new.”

A warm flush spread across Stephen’s cheeks.

oOo

Tony woke up to a truck in his driveway and came outside in a pair of sweats to see Pepper Potts shepherding men like she was a conductor and they were the musicians. Cardboard boxes were spread out like a small city, taking over the front lawn.

“What’s this?” He stood next to her, crossing his arms over his chest and trying to peek over her shoulder at the papers she was trying to sign.

“I had some people pack up Stephen’s things since he’s still missing,” she said, looking up out of the corner of her eyes. “I didn’t think you would want it in storage.”

There were so few boxes and, still, Tony knew that most of them would be filled with books. “No,” his voice was choked. “No, you’re right. Thank you.”

She placed her hand on his shoulder and went back to her symphony.

oOo

There was a motion—supposedly simple—where Stephen had to cross his arms at the wrist, slowly pull them apart, and change the shapes made by his hands. His skin was itching, his shoulders shaking, and every sound was like a jackhammer against the back of his neck. He wanted to scream, to cry, to just—to just—

(He felt as though someplace out in some country there was a map of the whole world with a pin in it for every person. And there still wasn’t a pin for him.)

In front of him, The Ancient One watched as he tried and tried and tried to copy every slowed down motion she made in front of him. With a soft hum that grated across Stephen’s skull like a fork across a bag of aluminium foil (it made him grind his teeth and hiss out a breath) she looked over him.

“I think that should be it for the day,” she said.

It felt as though someone had shoved a tube down his throat to pour ice into his stomach. His hands made a few jerking motions, not quite sure what they wanted to ask.

God, Stephen was just so damn _tired_. Even his blood could not be bothered with red-ness. It was too much work.

“Madra,” she said, “Madra, _breathe._ ”

Stephen choked on the heart in his throat, his fingers clawed at fabric that was too thick and thin and the desire to rip all of it away rolled across his skin like a windmill of nails. There was a pop of firecrackers on the street and he flinched away from the sound like it was inches from his ear. Some part of him wanted to scream and another wanted him to throw himself in the nearest lake where everything would be cold and calm and—

Something was placed in his hands and he blinked down at the goop that dripped around his fingers like a sloth trying to escape. It was a swirling mass with silvers, greens, and blues that sucked the heat out of his hands. Not quite slime, not so much putty. He rolled it between his fingers and, without realizing it, plonked himself down on the floor.

The Ancient One had her own bit of putty in her hands—though hers was a mix of gold, bronze, and red. “Breathe, Madra,” her voice didn’t grate so much but his attention was on slowly moulding shapes out of this substance that didn’t seem to want to make anything other than a puddle. “You’re over stimulated.”

Curling his fingers into a loose fist, Stephen laid his hand against his chest and rubbed in slow, tight circles.

“There’s no need to apologize,” The Ancient One said, “but I do want you to understand that no matter how long it takes for you to learn something, you will always have a place here at Kamar-Taj.”

He pressed the tips of his fingers repeatedly into the cool material, didn’t meet her eyes, and dipped his head.

“Do you need more time, or do you wish to continue?” She let Stephen take as long as he needed to think it over, simply copying his motion with the bit of slime-putty. A bird fluttered past the window and Stephen turned to look, traced the crosshatched walls with his eyes, and then finally glanced back at The Ancient One.

He nodded.

A secret played in her smile as she placed her putty in a small plastic container. “Very well, Madra,” a small, matching container was offered and Stephen took it, placing his own putty to the side. “May I touch you?” Both hands were offered—easily dismissed with a simple shake of his head if they needed to be.

Pale, scarred fingers quaked and Stephen stared down at them. With trembling, but slow movements, he placed his wrists in her hands.

The Ancient One grinned. “Thank you, Madra,” she said.

Over the next hour, long after the sun had set, Stephen let her gentle touch guide his arms to mastering the motions that had been such a struggle before. Before each touch, she asked for permission, her eyes on his to make sure he wasn’t pushing himself.

“And,” pulling away, The Ancient One crossed her arms, “with me.”

Stephen mirrored her motions and they trembled and were choppy, but he managed. He did it.

Despite the moon rising over Kamar-Taj, he felt as though sunlight had settled across his body.

“Well _done_ ,” The Ancient One said and raised her hand to his hair, asking only with her sharp, grey eyes.

He ducked his head and felt her steady, warm hands comb across his skull, nails gently scratching the skin, thumbs soothing that last, aching itch.

It surprised Stephen how such a small gesture could be so very big. How some days he hadn’t realized the nervousness or sadness that had taken root in his bones until the gentle touch of someone he trusted let it all out, like his body was exhaling.

oOo

“Test eleven for project Icaria,” Tony shook out one leg and winced. The boot felt about twenty pounds heavier each time he tried to take a step and it made his balance swing around like a drunk college student. “Despite all misgivings, DUM-E is still on fire safety.”

The robot beeped in acknowledgment and then promptly ducked like a scorned puppy when Tony pointed a couple of fingers at it.

“ _If_ you douse me again I’m donating you to a local college.”

Inside his garage, heat spilling from his feet and hands, Tony Stark managed to _fly_.

oOo

The lack of hours he had been sleeping finally caught up with Stephen and he woke up well after sunrise, stumbling through his morning routine. Others were milling around in the meditation room; novices and apprentices and masters alike.  Sunlight created columns through the incense smoke in the air and he sat closer to one of the more open areas, blinking slowly while his mind struggled to catch up to his body.

Fabric rustled, lungs exhaled, wood creaked.

Stephen breathed in. He breathed out.

Sweetly bitter smoke stuck to the edge of his nose, and there was a low hum through the floor, an echo of flapping fabric from the streets far below. A shadow grew across him, dragging the air from his lungs, holding it tight until he could feel each rapid beat of his heart against his oesophagus. Eyes pierced his flesh like barbed arrows, the clothing on his skin rubbed insistently at his spine.

Heat brushed over Stephen’s neck, touched his ear, stung his bones.

 _That’s it,_ a voice hissed from the edges of the world, curling around him like a serpent. _I want to **hear** you._

Stephen gagged on his choked scream and scrambled over the wood flooring. Someone cried out, jumping out of his path and he shot a hand forward in memorized motion with nothing but the desire to run, run, _run_.

Energy ripped through wood, tore apart the rugs, and blasted outwards in a supernova.

oOo

Something cold was running down Stephen’s neck and he breathed in, eyes fluttering open. They felt as if someone had spread mud across the lids and used a heat lamp to cake them shut. An ache was in the back of his throat, a throbbing in his sinuses, and he tried to swallow only for the motion to send flickering twinges up to his tongue.

He was floating above the ground, veins of gold magic flashing around him like lightning from a storm of his own making. Stephen blinked and watched one strand move across the room, hitting a spinning shield and bursting into fragments. There was a part of him that felt like salt had been rubbed across raw, sliced muscle, digging into his nerves and eating away his very sense of self.

The Ancient One was watching him, the air around them looking like someone had made it solid and brought a hammer down on the surface. People shimmered, broken into pieces like they were separated by hundreds of water-filled glasses. Stephen uncurled from his armadillo circle. Each bone cracked as he stretched, each muscle burned as it moved.

“Are you with me, Madra?”

Stephen licked his dry, cracked lips and nodded. Magic fell around him like rain and he followed it to the floor, landing among splinters with his bare feet. Wood panelling had been torn apart by ravenous wolf-mouths, thick claw marks gouging through the walls and ceiling, carving out fear and rage like a beast trapped in a cage. Knees gave out under his weight and Stephen hit the floor with a groan. The skin of his skull felt suspiciously tender so he wiped his hand around his face and stared down at the wetness left across the back of his hand.

“The good news,” The Ancient One said, her voice dazzled with her glitter and sequined joy, “is that you _can_ do magic.”

Stephen breathed out slowly and looked away, his throat closing, a flush rising to his pale cheeks.

“None of that; remember what I told you?” She didn’t move closer and he fumbled, trying to sit but instead collapsed like an old tree whose roots had been eaten. “Letting go and surrendering yourself was the only way to get the magic to accept you.” Her eyes moved over the fluttering remains of some rugs and the tapestries.

“Perhaps, though, I didn’t realize what that would look like,” The Ancient One mused. “I’m sorry I did not prepare you better.”

His lungs hitched and Stephen clapped his hands to his mouth to smother the sob that ripped through him. The Ancient One moved no more than an inch closer and he used his feet to push himself back a foot. Splinters clung to the fragile skin, picking at the pale skin and leaving pinprick drops of blood and thin, pink scrapes. Tattered, grey robes fluttered around his ankles and Stephen watched them and did his best to ignore the hot liquid that was dripping across his fingers.

Hands lifted and The Ancient One revealed her palms. Her voice was the gentle gurgle of a stream, trickling down his spine and he didn’t know if he should dip his feet in or pull away.

“Do you remember what happened?”

Stephen almost shook his head, froze, and swallowed around that ache in his throat. There had been smoke and he had been so _tired_.

He nodded and looked up under his bangs damp as they were with sweat.

“What was it that caused the attack?”

_Smoke and hot breath and the sting of nails in his flesh, tugging at his hips. “So noisy,” the man above him murmured, lips dripping with bitter rot. “It’s almost like you’re—”_

“Madra!”

Stephen jerked and looked up, his eyes shining with amber energy as gold sparks curled around him, baring its teeth like a cobra. The air shuddered around them and The Ancient One had her own mandala burning in front of her fingers.

The snake lashed, hitting the wall of sacred circles and Stephen tore his hands from his lips to suck in great, heaving breaths.

“You are letting too much through at a time,” The Ancient One said. “Slowly, Madra. _Gently_.”

It was like he had a box of emotions in the far closet of his brain. It had been taped shut but one cut along the top had made the contents spill out.  Stephen closed his eyes and lifted his arms. It was as if he could feel the rods and bones rattling together.

 _Smoke_ , he signed.

The Ancient One frowned and he spelled the word out. With a nod, she leaned her weight back. “Would it help to have a meditation room without incense?”

He shrugged and glanced over the panels that had been pulled up, bent, and snapped under the force of his emotions.

“This is _progress_ , Madra,” The Ancient One said. “It may not seem like it now, but only once the last of a building is removed can you start to rebuild.”

Shaking fingers with sharp, jerking motions began to spell. When they were done, they lowered, resting against the tops of his thighs.

“Stephen,” The Ancient One corrected herself and looked up at him, a smile playing on the edge of her lips. “It is nice to meet you, Stephen.”

oOo

Tony Stark was like Icarus.

(If Icarus had jumped off a cliff and built his wings on the way down.)

He launched out of his garage, a euphoric cry on his laps, laughter on his tongue. Stars stretched above him,  a whole new universe to explore just above the clouds. It was reflected in the California coastline below until space and ocean collided in a glittering mass of black. His wings were made of metal, his feathers the repulsors that vibrated beneath his feet and on his palms.

“Holy shit!” he cried, dipping close to the ocean and smelling the spray of salt water before pulling up, shooting over Las Angeles and it’s shorter, stockier buildings. Mountains dared him to approach like great shadows of giants but he turned away, deciding to save that for a day rather than a night.

 _“Sir,”_ Jarvis’ voice played around his head, _“Might I suggest that you stay over the water just in case of a malfunction.”_

“Worry wart,” Tony said fondly, but dipped back over the surf. He could see the glimmering lights of his mansion. He flew out until the lamps were nothing more than more twinkling stars and shot upwards. “Alright, let’s see what this thing can do. What’s the record for the SR-71?”

Wind howled in his ears and the moon watched his progress with her half lidded gaze.

_“The altitude record for fixed winged flight is eighty-five thousand feet, sir.”_

Around him, the horizon began to curve but Tony pushed the repulsors. His stomach dropped and giddiness bubbled through his lungs. “Records were made to be broken!” He said, that glee popping around his words. Tony aimed for the moon, his eyes on the grey surface, the suit buzzing around him.

Stars surrounded him, twinkling in their own amusement as they watched him climb and climb and climb.

Cold crawled over his biceps and thighs. It crept over the screen of the helmet.

_“Sir, there is a potentially fatal build-up of ice occurring.”_

Tony could see the numbers on his screen, the height of where he was. A few hundred feet to go. “Come on!” He told the suit. “Higher!”

A circuit board popped like a kernel and the power died.

The moon watched as metal wings crumbled beneath the might of the sun and Tony Stark screamed as he fell from the heavens.

There was nothing but darkness inside the helmet and the crushing, growing fear that the Earth was approaching, rising up to meet him. “We iced up, Jarvis! Deploy flaps!” Tony could see nothing but the small flashes of light from the city and the occasional wink of the moon. “Jarvis?”

There was nothing. The AI was silent.

Without the buzz of machinery, the wind screamed in his ears, hissed through cracks in the armour, bit and tore at his skin.

“Come on,” Tony pawed at his thigh where the manual overload sat untouched. The metal fingers were fat and fumbling. “We got to break the ice!” He managed to get a hold on the metal and twisted.

Light bloomed in the helmet, the settings loaded in a moment and Tony was shooting off, crashing through a wave with a scream of terrific laughter. Water washed over him, warm and melting off the rest of the thin layer of ice and he flew towards his mansion, heart thumping like a terrified bird against his chest.

“Alright,” Tony said, hovering above his roof. “Cut power.”

He dropped like a cannonball into his living room, through the grand piano, and into the lab below. The suit crushed his blue and white 1967 Shelby Cobra under its weight.

There was DUM-E, waiting with the fire extinguisher.

Tony groaned and closed his eyes.

 

* * *

 

Part Four:

grey eyed athena,

give us the strength to wear tragedies as armour

instead of as chains

 

Wong looked up from his book as Mordo came through the door of the library. The other master was almost stomping about, brow furrowed, lips pinched. He could feel the warm of the sunlight on those green robes and the smell of gentle, lavender soap.

“Where is he?”

Closing the text with a sigh, Wong stood. “This way,” he said, leading deeper into the stacks, past empty and filled tables before pausing at one just before The Ancient One’s collection. Dust and pages made up the room and there were students milling around, speaking softly, curled up to read or writing on their own paper.

“There,” his hand motioned towards the lax figure in a chair that was only on three of its legs, the fourth being too small.

Mordo groaned—the volume lower than what he probably would have made outside the library’s walls—and he looked over the man sitting at the table.

Stephen was leaning over a book, his arms crossed over the pages, cheek burrowed in his forearm. Feet stretched out beneath a table, almost as if the limbs they were attached to were too long to be contained and his old grey robes had been replaced by rosewood fabric. Figuring out the way to the energy had been just the stepping stone; from there Stephen had advanced faster than his teachers and other students could keep up.

With ended up with him sleeping in the library and missing his martial arts lessons.

Mordo stepped closer, grabbed the book—written in Sanskrit, another thing Stephen was learning faster than anyone had expected, and made of leather and old papyrus. It was probably over three hundred years old at the _least_ —and slowly pulled it out from his student’s head.

Fingers twitched.

“Stephen,” Mordo said, his voice nothing more than a murmur as he leaned over the other man, “ _Madra_ , wake up.”

He yanked the book out from under those thin arms. They hit the table and Stephen jerked, flying up and blinking owlishly. There was a moment of sharp, biting panic across his features before it eased into squinted confusion.

“There you are,” Mordo said. “Welcome back to the land of the living.”

Stephen blinked a couple of times and tapped one finger against his wrist.

“Does it matter?” Snapping the book shut, Mordo handed it over to Wong. “You’re late for your lesson.”

The face Stephen made was on par with that of a constipated troll. He stood up anyway and slouched after Mordo, waving goodbye to Wong like a man being led off to go swimming without protection in an aquarium filled with hungry sharks.

Mordo huffed without looking back. “Stop being so _dramatic_.”

oOo

There was a wrapped package sitting in the space Pepper had occupied a few days ago. It had been ignored until Tony walked past it, ice pack against the throbbing ache in his skull. He unwrapped it, ripping the brown paper instead of simply unfolding it, and smiled at the arc reactor glowing in the glass case.

 _PROOF THAT TONY STARK HAS A HEART,_ was carves around it and Tony laughed. 

oOo

Stephen sat in front of a computer for the first time in what felt like ages, his eyes on the news article from the Washington Post.

 _Tony Stark Returns, Stark Industries to Halt Weapon Manufacturing_.

A week after he had left and Tony had returned home. Scars rubbed across his cheeks and Stephen breathed out. There was a blooming, tired ache in Stephen’s bones and he wanted to go back, wanted to curl up in that bed of silk and hear the annoyed voice of the AI and listen to the pound of the ocean against the Cliffside.

But not yet. Not like this.

In the future, when he was strong enough to look at those brown eyes again, Stephen would head back to Malibu.

For now, though, there was more he had to do.

oOo

With one ice pack strapped to his shoulder and another pressed against his head, Tony spun in his circle of monitors with a low hum and avoided looking at the squished car in the corner of his garage, more grey than blue now that it was covered with debris and dust from the ceiling. There was a glass with green smoothie sitting next to his keyboard and U was holding a bit of red fabric and looked like it was trying to make itself seem busy in contrast to DUM-E who was in time out.

“Notes,” Tony said and watched the speech to text program open underneath the one that was still looking through every CCTV camera in the world (thirty percent complete and, when it reached one hundred, it would just repeat and repeat and repeat). “Main transducer feels sluggish at plus 40 altitude. Hull pressurization is problematic.” He took a sip of his smoothie and wrinkled his nose at the overwhelming taste of kiwi. “I'm thinking icing is the probable factor.”

 _“A very astute observation, sir,”_ Jarvis said, his reply written down beneath Tony’s original. _“Perhaps, if you intend to visit other planets, we should improve the exosystems.”_

Not a bad thought. Tony took another sip of his smoothie and swallowed it down. “Connect to the sys. co. Have it reconfigure the shell metals.” He spun around again on his chair to think. “Use the gold titanium alloy from the seraphim tactical satellite. That should ensure fuselage integrity while maintaining power-to-weight ratio. Got it?” Another drink of the smoothie.

 _“Yes,”_ Jarvis said. _“Shall I render using proposed specifications?”_

Tony turned to the 3d model of the suit on the screen and watched the original metal be turned to gold. “Thrill me.”

The computers beeped and he watched the program run before the moving images on the television caught his eyes. A blonde reporter stood in front of a wall where people passed, some getting their picture taken by the press.

“Tonight's red-hot red carpet is right here at the Disney Concert Hall,” she said, looking into the camera and speaking into the microphone, “where Tony Stark's third annual benefit for the Firefighter's Family Fund has become the place to be for L.A.'s high society.”

Tony rubbed at the bone beneath the arc reactor. “Jarvis, we get an invite for that?”

_“I have no record of an invitation, sir.”_

He frowned and lifted a prototype mould of the suit’s helmet to his face.

“—hasn't been seen in public since his bizarre and highly controversial press conference. Some claim he's suffering from posttraumatic stress and has been bedridden for weeks. Whatever the case may be, no one expects an appearance from him tonight.”

 _Ugh_. Tony rolled his eyes.

_“The render is complete.”_

Finishing off the last of his smoothie Tony looked over the new suit. It had been pained a bright gold. Shiny. Expensive. “A little ostentatious, don't you think?”

 _“What was I thinking?”_ Jarvis drawled, _“You're usually so discreet.”_

Pouring what was left in the blender into his cup, Tony looked over at his 1932 Ford Flathead Roadster with the painted flames along the black surface. “Tell you what. Throw a little hot-rod red in there.”

He could almost hear Jarvis’ non-existent sigh. _“Yes,”_ the AI said _, “that should help you keep a low profile.”_ The program ran and Tony took another sip of the green smoothie.

“The render is complete.” The red was the primary, the gold secondary. Not too flashy but just flashy enough.

It was _perfect_.

Placing his cup down on the table, Tony stood and reached for his watch. “Hey, I like it. Fabricate it. Paint it.”

 _“Commencing automated assembly,”_ Jarvis said, _“Estimated completion time is five hours.”_

Tony turned to head upstairs, already reaching for the icepack taped to his shoulder. “Don't wait up for me, honey.”

oOo

“Since you’ll want to use your hands as little as possible,” Mordo said, his steps slow over the smoothed stone of the sparring area. He had gotten rid of the thicker, green robes leaving him in a pair of baggy trousers and a sleeveless top. “It was a bit of a struggle to figure out a way to defend yourself.”

Sweat already beading on his forehead from the warm up, Stephen tightened the gloves on his hands, wincing as they forced his bones and rods together so they weren’t rubbing together with every flex. His signing clunked and rattled and his frown was directed at his fingers.

“It’s true,” Mordo said, “magic will be your primary weapon—but if someone gets too close you’ll need a way to defend yourself.”

That made sense. Stephen nodded and dropped into the defensive stance he’d already been taught.

“You’re going to want to avoid getting too close to people,” Mordo said, stepping around him so they were side by side. He called the first part Baguazhang, a martial art based on Taoism. Circle walking. An art to dodging, of getting behind attackers, of avoiding conflict.

The second was the Vietnamese art of Vovinam. Hard and soft, strength and gentleness.

And so.

Much.

Damn.

 _Kicking_.

oOo

Tony pulled his shirt off, tossed it towards the hamper, and paused at the sight of his bed. The shower was waiting, water already heating up to the perfect temperature, but he reached forward and brushed his fingers over the dark sheets and smiled.

 _“Hey,”_ the ghost of his past called, bounding into the room, _“baby, I’m **so** sorry it took so long—”_

The words fluttered away, whisked away by the past and the memory of the man snuggled into the bed. Stephen had claimed half the mattress with his limbs, face partially burrowed into the pillow. A pair of loose flannel pyjama pants hung low on his hips, covering the tops of his feet. Dark bruises hung under his eyes and his face was slack in his sleep but that didn’t quite ease the tension in his jaw and neck. It sparked a fond, quiet hum and Tony had shed his down to his boxers and climbed over the abandoned sheets to press into the warm body.

A hand lifted and wrapped around his waist and Tony echoed the laugh in his memory and smiled fondly at his now empty bed. With one final shake of his head, he turned to the shower before the happiness faded, leaving only an aching emptiness.

oOo

A cool breeze fluttered Stephen’s bangs and the borrowed headphones felt heavy in his ears. The nightmare was draining from his muscles with every soft guitar note, drowning the burning fear that had made a burrow in his throat. He closed his eyes at calm, soulful vocals and let himself be dragged back to a different day. 

Music played in a hotel suite, falling from speakers like vines in a garden, and there was a man with eyes like apple cider on a cold day with a smile that tasted like éclairs. The windows were open and a breeze ruffled the curtains, flaring out the fabric like the capes of superheroes.

Steady hands rested on broad shoulders and Stephen had rested his forehead against Tony’s, laughing as they swayed out of tune.  _“You’re ridiculous,”_ he had murmured and felt palms run down his ribs and waist before finally laying to rest on his hips.

 _“Yeah,”_ Tony returned. _“But you love it.”_

The sigh from the memory made Stephen open his eyes, back in Kamar-Taj where the ocean was gone and the sun was rising. ‘I do,’ his mouth formed the words but didn’t speak them, just mimicking the voice in his memories.

‘ _I do_.’

oOo

Tony slipped past Obadiah and already felt like he was going to drown in the circus of people milling outside the concert hall. He kept turning, expecting to see a tall figure to his left with a small, champagne smile and shining blue eyes. But there was nothing except strangers or people he didn’t care to know and he fled to the building as fast as he could without fuelling the tabloids more than they already were.

The bar a welcome mat and he went straight for it, tugging at the sleeves of his suit and fighting the urge to adjust his bowtie.

“Give me a Scotch,” Tony told the barkeep, shoving a fifty dollar bill into the tip glass. “I'm starving.”

“Mr. Stark?”

He blinked and looked over at the man standing to his right, fighting the urge to grind his teeth. Everything felt like someone was rubbing chalk over his bones—all grainy and dry and irritating. “Yeah?”

The thin haired man had his hands at his sides. A soldier, perhaps, but the black tie and wornness of his suit suggested he wore it as a uniform. “Agent Coulson.” Thank God he didn’t offer his hand, Tony might have slapped it away.

“Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah,” He picked up his scotch, “The guy from the—” The name fumbled in his mouth.

“Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division.”

Tony let out a soft ‘ _oomph_ ,’. “God,” he said, “you need a new name for that.”

“Yeah,” the man said with a smile that somehow managed to be pleasant and emotionless at the same time. “I hear that a lot.”

Tony wrinkled his nose and looked out over the crowd. It was the same kind of mob as always; the women in their expensive dresses, the men in their high end suits. All chatting and wearing similar masks made of fragile porcelain.

Hands brushed over his chest and he could remember Stephen above him—fresh faced and mostly a stranger. Those wiry, broad hands had braced against Tony’s chest and a slim, moonlight body lifting up and coming back down in such a gentle rolling motion that his heart had ached from it. Long, ashen legs were folded like fans against the violet sheets and black hair had been ruffled from its combed, slicked state so it hung over half-lidded starlight eyes.

Before that, the conversation had been gasped snark and moaned sass but then. _Then._

“ _Tony_ ,” Stephen Strange had arched his back, his voice had breaking with his need. The dim light of the suite had danced over his skin, played across the gentle muscle, and highlighted his shoulders as if he was hiding wings. With the reverberation of the Sicilian ocean outside the open windows, he had sounded so soft and sweet and _desperate_.

In a moment of thoughtlessness, Tony had reached up, had pulled the other man down, had brought those lips to his. Fingers combed through soft, downy brown hair, and Stephen whimpered his need.

Tony jerked out of the memory.

“—How about the 24th at 7:00 p.m. at Stark Industries?”

Blinking sharply, Tony focused on Pepper’s ginger hair and offered his hand to the agent without thinking about it. There was a low hum in his bones, a vibrating need to get out of the building, to touch something, to throw the glass at the wall. “Tell you what. You got it. You're absolutely right.” He let go of Coulson’s hand as soon as he could and motioned to the woman who seemed like a lighthouse in the sea of people. “Well, I'm going to go to my assistant, and we'll make a date.”

Leaving the bar, Coulson, and his drink behind, Tony slid through the crowd of people and slipped to Pepper’s side. “Hey,” he said, plastering a smile to his face. “You look fantastic! I didn't recognize you.”

She leveled him with her sharp, bright gaze and knocked the step stool out beneath his feet before the mask could even be put in place. “What are you doing here?”

“Just, uh,” his eyes shifted to glance towards the bar but he didn’t look, “avoiding government agents.”

Sighing, Pepper looked down over his suit with a soft hum. “Are you by yourself?”

“Yes,” Tony said quickly, before she could question it (that didn’t stop the glance or the softening of her expression and god _damn_ it). “Where'd you get that dress?”

“Oh,” Pepper’s eyes moved down for a moment then snapped back up. “It was a birthday present,” she admitted, not fooled for a second.

He smiled. Everything was fine. It was all just _fine_. “That's great.”

She sighed and the sound was so soft that it was more like a gentle exhale. “From Stephen, actually.”

Tony swallowed. “Well,” he managed, almost choking on the word. “He always—he—”

Slipping her arm through his, Pepper led him through the crowd and out to the balcony. “Breathe, Tony,” she said, taking him to the banister where they could look out over the city. Her eyes seemed brighter against the city lights, wide and shining. They were darker than Stephen’s but just as expressive. Just as kind.

That first night with Stephen bled around the edges of the party and Tony remembered the harsh scrub of calloused skin against his prickled facial hair and sitting up, not expecting anyone else to be there (all his other one night stands had left long before he had woken). But there was a weight in the blankets and pale flesh that looked like a star against the dark sheets.

Stephen’s lower half was only partially draped in silk, one leg spread out to the other side of the bed, arms curled under the pillow, back to the sunlight and curled like an antler. He looked like Morpheus, bowed in his slumber, body splattered with paint strokes of passion.

It was such an oddity to see him sleeping there. Such a warm, unexpected event, that Tony had laid down and watched shadows and light tango across the stretch of marble skin.

Cool fingers touched his hand, dragging the memory so gently away. Orange hair was softened against the dark blue dress and he stared at where the colours laid together.

Tony closed his eyes and groaned. “I’m sorry,” he said, careful to keep his voice low.

Pepper squeezed his palm and just smiled. “It’s alright,” she said and stayed with him.

oOo

Kamar-Taj had been softened by the faint blue of the sunrise. Light peeked over the edge of the horizon, the sun still waking up, and Stephen moved through the silent temple. His feet were bare and cold against the stone—a dull contrast to the warm cup of tea in his hands. There was music playing, drifting down from the higher levels and he followed the notes in a lazy pattern, stepping between the sanded down shadows and the leaves that had fallen during the night.

Robes fluttered against his skin, softened by use and gentled by soap and water. His own hair was wet from an early shower, ruffled by a towel he had later used to help him shave.

Orange fluttered over the horizon, lifting like the curve of a butterfly’s wings and spilled across the beige stone and Kathmandu like a Goddess. On the edge of the day there was silence and Stephen could close his eyes and revel in the knowledge that this was the time the old mythologies spoke of.

This was the time religions were born.

He found Mordo sitting at the wall, flute in hand as he played a tribute to the morning. Stephen sat beside him, curled his legs beneath his body, and took a sip of his tea.

There would be a long day ahead of them. A long week to begin.

But right then, in that moment, there was peace.

oOo

“I think I need a drink,” Tony told Pepper, pushing away from the banister. “Do you want anything?”

She rubbed a manicured hand over her nose. “Vodka,” she muttered. “Something with vodka or... or maybe a daiquiri.”

He smiled without meaning to. “Something sweet.”

“Yeah,” she said and leaned back against the concrete wall keeping her from plummeting twenty or more feet to the flashing cameras below.

Tony couldn’t help the amused smile that grew across his lips and made his way back to the bar. Coulson had left—thank God for small favours—and he leaned over the counter. “Strawberry daiquiri,” he said, “and a—” the order for a scotch died on his lips. “And a cosmopolitan martini.”

“Wow,” a blonde woman slid up to him, hair pulled back high off her neck. “Tony Stark.” She said his name like a curse.

“Sorry,” he looked over at her. “Have we met?” Stephen was always better at names and faces.

She held out her hand, he didn’t take it, too busy grabbing the glasses from the bartender. “Christine. I’m with Vanity Fair.”

Tony looked over the crowd, searching for Pepper. “Sorry,” he said, “I’m not doing any interviews at the moment—”

“You have a lot of nerve showing up here tonight.”

Jesus. Okay. “Look, honestly I just want to get back to my night and then disappear in my house for another month, alright?” Tony tried to dodge around her and almost spilled the cosmopolitan down his front. “Could you just—”

“I actually almost bought it, hook, line and sinker.”

Alright. He didn’t know her, had never met her, and now she was just standing there speaking in riddles. Tony wiped the emotion off his face and turned his dark eyes to her features. “I was out of town for a couple months, in case you didn't hear.”

She slapped a handful of pictures down on the bar. “Is this what you call accountability?” Her reporter eyes were still watching him and he had to set down the drinks in order to pick the pictures up. “It's a town called Gulmira. Heard of it?”

 _Gulmira._ Yensin.

A hand clamped around his stomach and tugged as he flipped through the images. A broken town, men who had captured him unloading weapons, a box labelled with _his_ company’s logo, the Jericho missiles. “When were these taken?”

“Yesterday.”

Tony slid the pictures into a pocket, grabbed the drinks, and headed out towards the balcony where Pepper still waited. “This is for you,” he said, giving her the bright pink drink. “Did you know about this?”

She accepted both, tossed her hair over one shoulder so she could focus, and frowned. “When was this?”

“Yesterday. Apparently.”

Pepper sucked in a breath between her teeth. “No,” she said, looking him in the eye. Her gaze was hard but open. “I didn’t know, Tony.”

He cursed, downed the martini, and took the pictures back. There was only one other person who could have known. One other person in the entire company who could have done it.

 _Obadiah_.

Tony bared his teeth in a sharp, wolf smile even as betrayal ate at his gut.

oOo

If knowledge was water than Stephen was a dehydrated man. With new doors open and new opportunities available, it only made sense that he would bury himself into the books, devouring everything he could. Wong was his constant companion in the library while The Ancient One and Mordo guided him outside of it. With nothing forbidden, he could take any book he wanted, read the practices, and _learn_.

It only made sense that his thirst would lead him to the Book of Cagliostro. There was a page missing, torn out from a ritual. He dragged the tip of his finger down the jagged edge, felt the teeth nip at his skin.

Humidity seeped into Kamar-Taj, the rain pattering against the rooftops, dripping over awnings, and landing in splashes in the courtyards. It was drier in the library. Drier, but Stephen’s robes still felt heavy, pulling down against his shoulders like weighted gazes. He looked over his shoulder, almost cradling the book in his arms.

Silly. It was all so silly. Stephen turned his attention to the table and placed the book upon it. He read until the rain stopped, until the sun had fully set, until the other students had gone to sleep. He read and he read and he read—until he reached the pages about time and Agamotto and the Eye.

A wall of Sanskrit surrounded a red drawing of the relic, describing the process of making it, opening it, and what it did.

 _Time_.

The Eye held the power of _time_.

Stephen looked over his shoulder towards the main area of the library and listened. No soft slide of feet, no creak of chairs. Just the silence that came when a room was empty. He got up to fetch the Eye, draped the woven leather and heavy bronze around his neck. The amulet settled against his sternum, surprisingly cold even through his robes.

Bracing himself, Stephen made the sigils with patient hands. He breathed in, smelled the wood and the rain, and pushed energy through the relic. The emblem twisted, the cage upon the eye moving apart and the metal lids opening to reveal a stone that stared outwards with harsh, green light. It illuminated the pages and the table with an eerie, almost ghastly glow.

Placing the heels of his palms together, Stephen stretched his fingers out and spun his palms clockwise. A sacred circle made of the same, green energy formed, crackling and flickering in the air. With a gentle pull, he guided it up his arm where it sat, braced against his palm and circling his sleeve like a magical wrist watch.

Magic tingled across his skin like sitting in a chair and realizing, at that moment, that half the year had passed. Stephen took a deep breath and turned his hand to the book and _twisted_.

Vellum came from the air, ink written across from it. A ghost made solid. The page with the ritual had returned, victorious and whole with a name written upon it.

_Dormammu._

The world shattered into fragments.

He could see himself in one, staring down at the torn book, another where he was looking over his shoulder, even more where he was forward, where he was gone, where there was nothing but smoke and ash—

“Stop!”

Stephen jerked. Green magic burst like a sparkler and faded into the dark. The bits of mirrors into time crumbled down, smoothing into the linear once again.

Mordo and Wong swooped past him and hands reached for the Book of Cagliostro, closing it, tearing it away from his hunger.

The eye had closed, the green glow gone. Stephen took a step back from the table and almost stumbled over his own feet.

“Tampering with continuum probabilities is forbidden!” Mordo said, his voice on the verge of hysteria. The words echoed through the empty library, bouncing around them until it seemed like the warning came from the very walls of Kamar-Taj.

Stephen’s hands shook too hard to sign and he fumbled before motioning helplessly towards the leather cover.

“And what did the book say,” Wong said, with a sharp frown that almost made the taller man wince, “about the dangers of performing that ritual?”

There was nothing Stephen could do but shrug and look away. The warnings hadn’t been before the spells which meant he hadn’t reached them. Moving away from the table, he avoided looking at the other masters, ducking his head like a dog receiving a scolding.

“Temporal manipulations,” Mordo continued, his hands twitching from harsh panic, “can create branches in time, unstable dimensional openings, spacial paradoxes, _time loops_. Do you want to get stuck reliving the same moment over and over forever or never having existed at all?” His words were like a snowball—all shock and suddenness, but no lasting harm.

Stephen shook his head frantically and signed his apologies with a tremulous hand.

Hanging the book back up in its chains, Wong sighed. “Your curiosity could have gotten you killed,” he said, softer than he had before. “We do not tamper with natural law, Stephen. We defend it.”

Wood creaked from the wind and Mordo groaned, taking the chair and dropping into it. “Be careful with these books, Madra,” he said, rubbing his hands down his face. “They are more dangerous than they seem.”

Shifting his weight, Stephen nodded. His gaze flickered between the men and the book before he had to force himself to look away.

Wong, glancing up from clasping the chain, sighed. “And you still have questions.”

Mordo moaned and placed his palms against his eyes.

With his fingers convulsing, Stephen still managed to spell out the name he had seen in the Book of Cagliostro.

_Dormammu._

Wong and Mordo glanced at each other.

oOo

 “You were right,” Tony told the holographic picture of Stephen that hovered on the wall. There was a glass of scotch in one hand, the bottle in the other. “You were right about all of it.” His laugh was cold and humourless as he took another long gulp from the bottle. “You were right about _him_ and you’re not even here to tell me ‘I told you so’.”

The label on the bottle faded in and out of focus. Tony grunted and threw it at the soft smile and warm eyes. It went through the hologram and shattered against the concrete wall behind it. “God, you’re a fucking _bastard_ , Strange.” He sucked an ice cube into his mouth, let it melt across his tongue. “He did it, you know?” the words were slurred as a tongue tried to form sounds around the obstacle in its way. “He finally fucking did it—filed the injunction, sold weapons to fucking _terrorists_.”

Another bitter laugh.

“The same fucking terrorists that cut a hole in my chest! How’s that for fucking irony, huh, Doc?” Tony swung his arm and watched the amber liquid splatter across the floor. Ice skidded in all directions and the glass broke along the side, joining the mess.

 _“Sir,”_ Jarvis spoke up, _“Miss Potts is on the line.”_

Tony snorted. “Not interested.”

_“She says it’s an emergency.”_

He groaned and sprawled out along the couch. “ _Fine_.” There was a moment of silence and then the beep of the call connecting. “What is it?”

 _“Good evening to you too,”_ Pepper said with a slight grumble. He couldn’t even get mad—he was the one who dragged her away from the party in order to snoop around Stark Industries. _“I managed to get all those files you requested. Obadiah and the rest of the board weren’t very thorough when cleaning up their tracks.”_

Tony sat up. “What can we get them on?”

 _“Corporate espionage for one,”_ Pepper grunted and there was the sound of something shifting. _“Bribery, selling to bad guys. The usual.”_

He rubbed his hands down his face and glanced over at the work tables. The prototype face mask still sat there. “Cool, cool. Hey, I’m gonna be working on something so don’t bother me for about twenty-four hours, alright?”

Pepper hummed, the sound filled with static as it came over the speakers. _“I’ll email you with anything else I find.”_

“You’re an angel,” Tony said, standing up. He didn’t notice when she hung up, didn’t notice the hologram of Stephen falling away.

The pictures the reporter had given him were sitting on the bench, mocking him. Tony picked them up and looked over at the suit’s helmet.

oOo

 “Beyond our world,” Wong said, guiding Mordo and Stephen to the stand that had held the Eye and the massive globe that floated above it. “There are infinite dimensions. One of these is the realm of Dormammu; the Dark Dimension.”

Purple smoke spread across the brass world, swallowing the lights of the cities and people until there was nothing but a consuming mass that went on and on and on in its hunger.

“Our duty as Sorcerers is to protect the world from mystical threats like him.”

Stephen took a step back from the stand. He listed his hands, shook his head. This wasn’t what he wanted—he was never a soldier, never willing to fight in a _war_.

“Why are you here then, Stephen?” Wong’s dark eyes seemed to pierce through the thin gaps between his ribs, puncturing the soft, squishy parts the bone protected. “Why are you at Kamar-Taj?”

_Why, why, why, why?_

He wanted to fix his hands. He had wanted to be _better_.

“Better?” Wong’s voice was merciless. “For who?”

For—

For him.

For Tony.

For—

He didn’t know.

Stephen dug his fingers through his hair, combed the strands desperately away from his face. He had wanted his hands back, his ability to practice medicine again.

He wanted to be someone worthy of Tony Stark. A rough, grating swallow felt like sandpaper in his throat and Stephen looked up at Wong and Mordo.

A bell tolled.

Stephen glanced at the ceiling as one of the three sigils on the wall opened. There was a burst of flame, the crumbling of stone, and he was knocked backwards through something that shimmered with faint, gold light.

Hardwood flooring hit his back instead of stone, and Stephen covered his face as debris fell down around him. The portal to Kamar-Taj ripped and burst, fading away to leave nothing but a blank, grey wall behind. Scrambling to his feet, Stephen took an unsteady step forward, pressed his hands against the barrier.

It was solid.

Rubbing his arm across his face, Stephen winced. He gently pressed his fingers against torn skin and wiped the blood on his shirt before turning to explore the new place and maybe find a way back to Kamar-Taj.

oOo

Tony would be happy to never see Afghanistan ever again. From the sky, from the ground, from satellite images— from _anywhere_.  It smelled like dust and gunpowder, like blood and gasoline. The Suit filtered most of it but it lingered on his tongue like the aftertaste of a bad vintage. There was some part of him that felt like heated water had been dumped across his flesh.

He checked three times to make sure it wasn’t the suit overheating.

(But he could feel sand against his legs and sun against his shoulders and the arc reactor _ached_.)

Brutality blazed from his heart and was made real by the hot fire of the repulsors.

Tony smiled for the first time in hours when the Jericho missiles exploded under the heat.

With the Ten Rings’ arms depot in shambles, he turned to head back home and came face to face with the United States Air Force.

“God _damn_ it.”

oOo

Master Daniel Drumm dropped in the Foyer of the New York Sanctum, a shattered bit of Space-Time protruding from his chest. Stephen stood at the top of the staircase, his eyes on the blood that spread across the soft, beige and gold robes.

“Another student of Kamar-Taj,” the killer said. He had dark eyes, the skin around them burned and rotting away like scales in a bonfire. “Have they told you what you’ve gotten into?”

Stephen backed up to the banister. The only exits were the front door—currently blocked by the three sorcerers to the front of him—and the broken portal to Kamar-Taj. Daniel was on the floor, unmoving.

There was no way to tell if he was breathing from so far away.

_Our duty is to protect the world from mystical threats._

Stephen summoned a whip of fire and slapped the first zealot across the face when she got too close.

oOo

_“I would recommend evasive manoeuvres, sir.”_

“Yeah!” Tony killed power to the repulsors so he dropped out of the sky. The hissing snap bang of the jet engines blasted over him and he shot off in the opposite direction, towards the curving rise of the mountains. “No _shit_ , Jarvis!”

The AWAC and Global Hawk both did a u-turn, flipping around to point their noses at his boots. He couldn’t outrun them, not like this, which only meant that he’d have to drop out of sight.

“Shit, shit, _shit_ ,” he kept close to the ground, scanning the horizon for cover.

Shrubs, rock, sand, and the occasional cloud. That’s what he had to work with. “Jarvis!”

 _“I’m looking, sir,_ the AI said. _“But it looks as though the images on the database are out of date.”_

“Then find a different database!”

oOo

Stephen refused to go down in a magical house in the middle of Manhattan.

He refused to give in to Kaecilius Who-Ever-The-Hell that had a problem with the Sanctums and living on Earth.

And he _definitely_ refused to just flat out fucking _die_. In general. It was probably his top priority at the moment.

Blood was dripping from Stephen’s forehead where his skull had been smashed into a mirror. Upper shoulders ached from being tossed about, knees felt like they would give out any moment, but he spun on one foot despite the way his body protested.

The hard bone of a heel slammed into a zealot’s jaw with a _crack_.

His heart was roaring in his head and everything was too focused like an exaggerate blur effect trying to convey motion through an image. Each bone felt like it was made of jelly, each breath was like fire burning through his throat and all he could do was wheeze.

Stephen managed to push her through the gateway over the ocean and watched the glass shatter beneath her back. There was a howl that was swiftly muffled by a splash.

He scrambled for the dial as she surfaced.

A weight slammed him, chest first, into the wall. Aching fingers pawed at the knob, managing to turn it clockwise once.

Stephen dove to the side, flinching as a vase shattered on the floor. Rushing back to his feet, he looked up at the zealot with a blank face and burned out eyes. Magic hissed in the air and fragmented space-time slammed into the ground his body had been.

Another slice, a punch that whistled over his head, and Stephen landed a kick against a knee.

The zealot grunted and his weapon died in a burst of glass sparks. Stephen spun around him, bent his knee, and hit the man in the ass with a side kick that sent the flailing body tumbling through the broken window.

Before the man could scream, the dial had already been turned, locking him out of the Sanctum.

“I’m impressed,” Kaecilius said.

Stephen spun around, his heart a throb in his chest, his throat a dry, sandpaper ache, and his hands flexing open and closed.

The first swing was ducked. The second was rolled under. Stephen got behind Kaecilius, almost tripped over his own legs, and took off running down the hallway.

Blood oozed over his eye, across his cheeks, onto his lips. It tasted like copper and sweat and endings.

Space-Time hit the wall next to his head, shattering into splinters.

Stephen took the stairs three at a time up to the relic room, summoning a second whip when he was close to the top. He shook his hair out of his eyes, splattered blood across the floor, and yelped when Kaecilius jumped the banister and took a swing at his head.

Reaching for anything, Stephen grabbed a vase that had something glowing inside it and lifted the whole thing like a canon.

Kaecilius flinched back.

They stared at each other.

“You don’t know how to use that, do you?”

Stephen looked down at the relic, glanced back up, and shrugged. He threw the whole thing at the other man before slapping down with the whip, carving burned lines into old wood, just missing Kaecilius’ legs.

A kick knocked him through the first case and glass shattered, falling across his face like sharpened jagged bits of rain. The whip was lost in his mad scramble to get up and Stephen grunted as a second blow caught him in the chest.

Force smashed him into another relic’s stand and wooden beams fell over his back and arms, catching on the blue fabric of his robes. Stephen hadn’t quite managed to make it all the way to the floor on the other side and knees hitting the foot high base. White fire shot through his thighs as he crawled away from a rolling helmet as glass but into his palms.

He could taste the blood against the back of his throat, could feel the pounding throb of the rods in his fingers as he ducked another swing only to be kicked into another case. This one he only shouldered through and landed on jagged edges of glass that sliced into his heavy robes.

Stephen groaned as a hand grabbed him by his collar, forcing him to his knees like a man at his execution.

Space-Time whistled through the air and he flinched, bringing his arms up—

Fabric stopped the magic before it impaled his chest and Stephen looked up at the floating, crimson cloak. It fluttered, collar straightening in irritation, blocking each of wildly swung blow.

With a full body grunt, Kaecilius threw Stephen across the glass covered floor and stalked forward as shaking legs and aching hands struggled to get up. With one last spinning kick, he sent Stephen over the banister and tumbling towards the stairs.

Velvet and silk whipped through the air, wrapping around an aching body before it could hit the ground. Stephen gasped as heavy fabric pressed against his shoulders, cupped his neck, and fluttered around his thighs.

Higher and higher he went until he was well above the staircase and the floor of the Sanctum.

 _He could fly_.

oOo

Tony shot towards the clouds and panted against the screen. He didn’t have to look behind himself to know that the jets were on his tail, didn’t have to be a genius to know that they were taking aim again.

“Sir,” Jarvis said, “Should I—”

“Yes!” He yelled, dropping out of the line of fire before spinning around, trying a rollercoaster of a path to get higher into the sky where altitude might stop the pilots from being able to follow. “Call him!”

oOo

In California, Colonel Rhodes looked up at the screen currently tracking what the Air Force believed to be a UAV as his best friend was on the other end of his phone.

 _“This is not a piece of equipment; I'm in it.”_ Tony cried through the speaker. _“It's a suit. It's me!”_

oOo

With Kaecilius bound beneath the window in the relic room, Stephen sat down on the stairs and breathed carefully. Each stretch of his ribs felt like he was being slowly pulled apart and he pressed his palm against his sternum. Behind him there was muttering. Gagged, because he didn’t want to have any part of that conversation (and words were dangerous in their power).

Stephen tore strips of cloth from an old shirt he found in one of the closets and used it to wrap the cuts on his hands. He winced, they stung, but he was done with the right and halfway through the left when a portal opened just below the stairs.

Sentient fabric wrenched him up and back, out of the way of the spear that would have impaled him. The zealot from earlier—the man he had tossed into the rainforest—snarled on his way up, summoning a second fragment.

Stephen scrambled to his feet. He could see Kaecilius’ eyes on him, could feel the world slow as he reached for the axe upon the wall.

His fingers grasped the handle as gold and violet energy exploded outwards.

The weapon was torn from Stephen’s grip as he was launched backwards, over cases and into shelves. Books fell over him, slamming into his backs, arms, and legs as he collapsed to the floor. Everything fizzed in and out, the world spinning like a teacup on that affronted Disney World ride. Blood dripped on the floor, dark enough that it seemed to hide against the old wood.

Only the sound of Stephen’s pained breathing broke the stiff, dead quiet that had settled. The weight on his back was crushing his chest and a soft, pained whine fluttered through his lips. With deliberate slowness, Stephen dug his nails into the floorboards and wrenched himself out from under the bookshelves. Pages caught on his face, leather dug into his bag, but he pulled and pushed and finally, finally, _finally_ was freed.

Panting, he looked over the room of relics.

Kaecilius was gone and his zealot—

His zealot was laying halfway between the stairs and Stephen, the axe embedded in his neck.

oOo

The twenty-four hours were up and Pepper Potts came downstairs to broken glass and Tony.

Tony, who was grunting as machines pulled at his legs and arms. The suit of armour was clinging to his body like an octopus. A very angry, very hungry octopus. At some point, a portion of the metal had been dented shut and it caused what looked to be a full shut down of _anything_ coming off.

“Hey! Ow! Ow-ah-ah-ah- _ah_!”

_“_ _It is a **tight** fit, sir.”_

Folder in her arms, Pepper watched with a bemused frown as her boss and friend stood on a platform surrounded by various power tools connected to robotic arms.

Jerking away from the grabby robot fingers that reached for him, Tony glowered at the ceiling. “Ow!”

  _“_ _Sir,”_ Jarvis said, sounding exasperated and yet amused at the same time. _“The more you struggle, the more this is going to hurt.”_

“Ohh,” Tony crooned, “Be gentle. This is my first time.” Another, swift tug. Almost an admonishment. “Ow! Jarvis!” he grunted as one of the tools latched to his back and tried to keep him still. “I designed this to come off—”

 _“Please,”_ The AI could barely be heard over the various whirl of machinery, _“try not to move, sir.”_

Pepper walked around the spilled glass, her heels clinking against the mess and the concrete. “What's going on here?”

Everyone froze. Tony, Jarvis, the machines trying to take off the suit. There was a moment where Pepper was sure that the man was going to stammer his way through some sort of excuse.

Instead, brown eyes looked over her, glanced down at the metal currently attached to Tony’s body, and crinkled when a billion dollar sheepish smile spread across chapped lips.

“Let's face it,” Tony said. “This is not the worst thing you've caught me doing.”

No. No there was the streaking and the wild parties and whatever kind of kinky shit he and Stephen got into.

But this? This was definitely a first.

“Are those _bullet_ holes?”

oOo

Stephen threw up in the Sanctum’s toilet.

He heaved and gasped and felt his mouth burn from the bile as thick, hiccupping sobs ripped apart his already aching ribs. Saliva dripped down his lip, mixing with blood and tears to fall off his chin and into the water. There was no way he could look at his porcelain rattling hands.

 _They_ had reached for the axe that had killed the zealot. Had killed that man.

One promise. Just one.

 _Do no harm_.

He couldn’t even follow that.

Mordo reached over and flushed it all down before rubbing his hand across shoulders wound tighter than a jack-in-the-box. “Just let it out,” he said, “there you go.”

Stephen wretched again and trembled.  Fingers brushed through his hair and he whined low and high in the back of his throat.

“There you go,” Mordo’s voice was softer than he’d ever heard it. “Magic gets rough sometimes but you did well, Madra.”

Closing his eyes, Stephen didn’t have the courage to tell him why he was wrong.

oOo

Tony looked over the papers Pepper had gathered up. She was sitting partially on the couch, legs folded beneath her, StarkPad in hand as he read over everything she had managed to gather.

“So we have almost everything.”

“Almost?” She said, looking up from the screen.

Rubbing a hand down his face, Tony placed the folder on the coffee table. “We should check the mainframe,” he said, “see if there’s any ghost drives.”

Pepper blinked and sighed. Her legs unfolded and she placed her StarkPad on the couch. “And—let me guess—you can’t access them from here.”

Tony smiled with all of his charm.

With a bone deep sigh, Pepper flung her arm over the back of the couch and looked at him with sharp, blue eyes. They glinted like spears on the horizon. “Fine,” she said. “What do you need me to do?”

He dropped the flash drive into her lap.

oOo

The Ancient One falls from the mirror dimension.

She falls and she falls and she _falls_.

(There’s nothing Stephen can do to catch her.)

 

* * *

 

Part Five

the lesson of prometheus says this:

forget perfect.

do good instead.

 

Stephen stood outside the operating room. His hands were clasped in front of him, his eyes never leaving the body on the table. Doctors and nurses moved in a well oiled—if chaotic—machine but he felt nothing but a stinging numbness that flowed through his arteries like a pebble slowly rolling down a hill. Mordo had left, to go process the fact that their teacher had pulled power from the Dark Dimension or to keep watch over the Sanctum, he wasn’t quite sure.

But he was alone.

The heart monitor flickered and Stephen watched it jump then steady. His eyes moved towards the limp body that seemed so small in the thick yellows. In a moment of desperate hope, Stephen pulled his astral form from his body. The world shifted blue and slowed to almost nothingness. It would have taken him a hundred years to take a single step in his body—but he wasn’t in it, so that didn’t matter.

Robes flickered, fading through the wall, and he chased through the hospital hallways, the cafeteria and, finally, a balcony looking out over Manhattan.

Framed against the drifting rainfall, her head tilted towards the sky, was The Ancient One.

“You _are_ clever,” she said as he joined her, not looking away from the storm. “And it’s always the clever ones, isn’t it?” With a soft hum, The Ancient One’s weighted gaze turned to him. After a moment, she reached forward and Stephen jerked in surprise and stared at the hands hovering just inches from his face. She was looking at him with such patience, palms tilted upwards, face softened with unexpected kindness.

Around them, the rain came down, slow and sparkling like crystals.

He looked over her gently calloused skin, the small wrinkles between her thumb and pointer finger, and the tiny scars around her nails.

With a small, hitched breath, Stephen laid his jaw in those hands.

Her smile was warm and proud even as her thumbs ran over his cheeks, tracing his nose and mandible and zygomatics like a soft paintbrush.  “I _am_ proud of you, Madra,” The Ancient One murmured as lightning expanded above them. “More than you could ever know.”

Stephen felt like a warm, slumbering cat had settled in his stomach before it dropped away and the heavy, ink of dread returned. She was dying and there was nothing he could do to save her. It boiled beneath his skin, bubbled over the edges of his flesh like a pot on the stove. The ache settled in him—in his chest and his fingers and his throat.

 “I don’t want you to go.”

The Ancient One blinked twice and then her smile softened her features like a sunset after a long storm, where golden light illuminated the clouds and the world. “It’s a harsh lesson,” she said, “learning to let go.” She ran her hands down his neck to his shoulders and looked out over the city where the rain glittered like tiny crystals and seemed more like snow. “You came to us, lost, terrified, and so very _young_.”

He turned away to stare at the frozen ships on dark water.

“Did you think I could not recognize your trauma when I saw it?”

A hand grabbed all the organs in his stomach and wringed them like a sponge. The words didn’t come, lost somewhere between his lungs and his throat.

The Ancient One hummed. “I’ve seen that look many times,” she said. “ _Too_ many times on too many faces.”

“It—“ the words came, spilling from his lips whether Stephen wanted them to or not. “It was my fault. I—” He swallowed, closed his eyes, and continued, his voice just barely heard over the slow rumble of thunder. “I _agreed_.”

“Did you want to?” The Ancient One’s gaze peeled back every layer, leaving him open and bare. “Did you _want_ to agree, Madra?” She leaned closer. “Did they give you a _choice_?”

He had... he had been so _desperate_.

Stephen closed his eyes and turned away.

“Coercion is not consent,” She said and the words felt like they were being hammered into his soul. “Taking advantage of someone’s situation is not consent.”

A frightful rabbit in his soul wanted to run from the words, wanted to flee and scream and scramble into the dark after being tugged so ruthlessly into the light. The rain around them seemed to magnify every little bit of light so it was focused on him and his bared, aching soul.

The Ancient One’s voice softened so very carefully but her words still felt like a rolling pin of needles across his flesh. “You were _raped_ , Stephen.”

Something inside that jabbed into every single part of his being like a stick was snapped in half. He felt it vibrate through his chest and his legs, felt it release the bit of himself it had held hostage. Stephen stared at The Ancient One and shook, eyes glistening in the sharp, silver-blue lightning. There was a small bit of him looking for guidance, looking for help.

Like a sheepdog to a shepherd.

“Oh, Stephen,” she said and opened her arms. He fell into them with a body wracking sob and buried his face into the neckline of her robes.  “There is so much in our pasts that we cannot change, so many things unanswered that could destroy us,” her breath was hot against his skin, even in the Astral plane.

Stephen’s fingers tightened in her robes, nails digging in to the fabric. The car accident, the man, _Tony_. It all whipped through him, tearing every piece of himself apart and then sewing it back together, bit by bit. He released it all against The Ancient One and, even in the moment of her death, she was kind, she was understanding, and she held firm.

“That’s it, Stephen,” Her voice washed over him like a shower, cleansing away the grime with orange scented soap. “Just let it go.”

oOo

Pepper Potts grabbed Agent Coulson on her way through the front doors of Stark Industries, her heels clacking against the floor, eyes firmly ahead. “I know you were expecting this meeting to be about Tony,” she said once they had breached the front entrance. “But I think we have more important things to discuss.”

It took an hour for Coulson to read through all of the files but by the time he agreed to gather a couple of agents to arrest Obadiah Stane, Tony wasn’t answering his phone.

oOo

Stephen looked through the window to the OR and felt like days had passed since he had last stood there. Perhaps it had been, perhaps the time with The Ancient One really had been that long. The heart monitor had stopped, the time of death called.

He looked up as boots pounded down the corridor.

“Is she?” Mordo didn’t glance through the window and his eyes stayed stubbornly focused on the floor.

 _“He is so stubborn,”_ The Ancient One had said, looking up at the sky. She and Stephen side by side, leaning against each other. _“The two of you will balance each other out when I’m gone.”_

Stephen shook his head. He felt drained. Like a boil inside of him had finally been popped after so long. It was tender and soft but was open to the future and healing.

“Would you,” Mordo started and paused. The muscles along his jaw flexed. “I would like to say my goodbyes,” he said. “Could you—?”

 _I’ll meet you back at Kamar-Taj_ , Stephen signed. Because he had something he needed to do as well. He left Mordo at the window and walked through the hospital.

 _Tony_. He wanted to see Tony, wanted to speak to him, _hear him_. But Kaecilius was still out there and without The Ancient One the world was vulnerable. Stephen exited out into the storm and the rain battered his face, soaked through his robes.

If he was to die, he wanted to have at least seen Tony one last time.

Stephen opened a portal in rainy Manhattan and stepped out into the warm, dry air of Malibu. The ocean salted his lips and the desert sun had long fallen over the horizon. Soft, honeycomb light shone through the tall, mansion windows and looked so welcoming against the navy horizon and glittering stars of Los Angeles.

He had arrived next to the helipad and used the shadows between the small lights along the driveways to keep out of sight, ducking along the bushes until he could see the front doors.

A silver car in front. Obadiah’s car.

Stephen shook the water out of his hair and walked along the rise of concrete with their thick bushes, floating to the ground gently with the use of the cloak that was still clasped around his shoulders.

The doors to the mansion were open. Unlocked wasn’t unusual, but _open_. He slipped through, heart thudding in his chest.

Windows stretched out along the living room, looking out over the ocean with the couches facing inwards instead of towards the view. Stephen had laughed about it once, commenting on how Tony would rather look at what he created than what the world was doing to try and keep up.

(That little bit of snark had ended up with him looking out towards Los Angeles, gasping and on his knees while Tony made sure he knew just how _much_ that billion dollar view was enjoyed.)

Now, with the couches pointed towards the entryway, Stephen felt rocks drop into his stomach.

Tony was slumped down against the cushions, his head tilted back, staring blankly at the ceiling as Obadiah Stane stood over him. The man was leaning forward, still dressed in his clothes for the day, hand braced against the leather backing of the couch, saying something that didn’t travel well through the cavernous halls of the mansion.

There was something in his hand that was just a bit bigger than a clenched fist, something that _glowed_.

It was wrenched out with a slick _pop_.

Limbs jerked and Tony’s gasp was a soft, pained thing that ripped through Stephen. He made a deep, hateful noise in the back of his throat and Obadiah spun around, dark eyes glinting like a spider hidden beneath the bed.

Hissing, breathless silence settled between them like the snapping, growling tension between two territorial tigers.

Stephen bared his teeth.

“ _You_ ,” Obadiah snarled and fumbled for something in the open case on the coffee table.  His gun came loose as Stephen jumped down the stairs and darted behind one of the concrete columns. “Tony Stark’s fuck toy returns!”

The crack of the gun snapped the quiet in half and glass shattered. Stephen flinched but watched in the rippling, useless reflection of the window as Obadiah scrambled to tuck whatever he was holding into the case. He moved to glance around the pillar and flinched back when the thunderous snap came again. Concrete broke off, clattering against the floor.

“Neither of you can stop this!” Obadiah howled and he walked towards the door. Stephen’s hands twitched as he searched desperately through every spell he knew, hoping against hope that the gun wouldn’t be pointed at the prone Tony on the couch.

An engine roared to life and Stephen breathed. He almost tripped over his own feet in his mad scramble to the couch and saw Tony—slack face and blank eyed—staring up at the ceiling.

No, no, no, _no_.

The white shirt was torn leaving a gaping, metal hole in a barely moving chest. That thing—the glowing thing—that Obadiah had been holding. Stephen hissed out a breath between his teeth, brushed the hair from Tony’s face, and then ran down the stairs to the lab.

Glass was everywhere and he slipped, shoulder hitting the wall before he regained his balance. There was shit _everywhere_. On every surface. Tools, wires, matrixes.

 _Come on, Tony_ , Stephen raced past DUM-E who looked up with a surprised couple of beeps.

A case sat on one table.

In it was something that glowed.

oOo

Tony felt as if his entire body was nothing more than white noise on a television. The ceiling moved, Obadiah grew two, three, _four_ heads and noise felt like it was jabbing into him like he was a piñata and it was the stick.

The gunshot made him jerk and he wanted to open his mouth, wanted to scream and cry and hiss out every single damn curse he could manage—

Obadiah was gone and there was a face above him—pale like the moon with bright, glimmering eyes that looked so much like stardust. Red fabric fluttered, blue cloth looked almost black in the florescent lights, and a gentle, trembling hand brushed across his cheek before it was gone. Whisked away like a dream.

oOo

Stephen smashed the case against the floor and pulled the little glowing machine from the stand. He ran past DUM-E, past U, over the glass, and back up the stairs. His shaking, trembling hands were too big to fit into the metal tube and he set everything down to raise his fingers. They twisted and magic lifted the magic, magic guided it over.

The wires plugged back in and Tony drew in a deep, shuddering breath, but the faint, blue-white light flickered before it steadied.

He didn’t know what it was for, didn’t know why it was needed, but Stephen straddled Tony’s lap and cupped pale cheeks in his palms. The veins along his neck were bruise blue and swollen. Lips pressed against them, nothing more than a simple breath of affection.

Stephen tilted back, undid the wrappings on his left hand, and scratched off one of the scabs. Blood oozed from his knuckles and he grimaced, the rods burning as if they were made of cooling lava. He gathered the blood on his finger, bent forward, and began to draw across the glowing surface.

Tony groaned beneath him and Stephen hummed as he worked, stopping occasionally to press kisses against a sweaty brow and slowly flushing cheeks. With one last dot, the sigil was finished and a slim back bowed as trembling palms pressed against the torn t-shirt.

Magic was all about energy; dimensional energy, his own energy. A slow, steady breath entered Stephen and he looked up at the ceiling, past the concrete and plaster, through the wood and shingles, up to the sky. The earth spun through a moving solar system that existed on the arm of a galaxy in an ever expanding universe. Her created a triangle around the chest piece, closed his eyes, and let go.

Each breath was filled with stardust, each beat of his heart echoed by billions of others. Pure magic rose through the cracks of the mansion, spinning around the two men on the couch and a sigil drawn with blood began to glow brighter and brighter until it flooded the mansion.

 _Let him be protected,_ Stephen willed, _let him be strong_.

Tony gasped, arching off the leather. His eyes blinked once, twice, and focused.

_Let there be power._

Flickering light steadied and the sigil faded to glimmering silver.

“St-Stephen?” Tony’s arm twitched, the blue veins had sunk back into his pasty skin.

“Shhh,” Stephen whistled between his molars, taking the hand that was trying to move. He brushed his lips along the knuckles, laid his cheek into the palm.

An engine approached.

He had to leave. There was Kaecilius and Mordo and the Sanctums to look after. Obadiah was Tony’s—Tony’s battle, Tony’s fight. A battle waited elsewhere for him.

God how he wished they could face them both together.

God how he wished this story had ended differently.

Leaning down, Stephen pressed his lips to Tony’s in a kiss that felt like early summer mornings and rainy goodbyes. Scarred hands cupped a firm jaw, arched over the neck and rubbed along softened cheekbones.  A small, desperate moan rose in the body beneath him and it was echoed in a thin, aching chest.

Tony tasted like green smoothies and blackberry Izzes, like metal and sweat, like tomorrows and yesterdays and every second in-between.

He tasted like _home_.

Stephen pulled away with such tender slowness and laid his forehead down on Tony’s, breathing in that faint twang of sweat and grease, wanting to promise to return.

But he pulled away as tires screeched to a halt on the driveway.

By the time Rhodey entered the mansion, the last of the gold sparks had faded.

oOo

Mordo looked up, the stand for the Eye of Agamotto in front of him as Stephen stumbled through his portal. Debris still covered the floor and the brass, giant globe had been knocked loose, hanging threateningly above their heads.

“Where were you?” Dark eyes were red around the corners, arms crossed over a broad chest.

Stephen shook his head and rubbed at his wrists. His hand was still oozing and he watched the blood drip slowly down his fingers.

“She’s dead,” Mordo said in a breathless almost panicky way. “Dead, and I knew nothing about her, did I?”

Blue eyes flickered up and Stephen watched Mordo as he began pacing around the circular room, stepping over broken stone and wood. He could offer no solace except his own ears and silence.

“Her transgressions drew the zealots to Dormammu, opened the pathways for that bridge to be crossed,” Mordo rubbed his hands down his face. “And what do we have now?” He motioned to the destruction. “Nothing but ruin and betrayal.”

Stephen stepped forward and clenched his hands into fists. He brought them together, fingers touching, and made small circles as if stirring batter in a bowl.

Then he offered one hand to the man who stood across from him.

Mordo looked down at the pale fingers, at the scars that stretched across the palms and phalanges. “Together,” he said and made a little half-scoffing laugh. “ _Together_ indeed.”

But he took the offered hand and Stephen, his chest aching, his knees burning, gave the other man a small but no less warm smile.

oOo

“Tony! _Tony!_ ”

Hands touched stinging, buzzing skin and Tony jerked away with a groan. He could still taste the faint metallic of blood and dust and something sweet on his lips. “S-Stephen?” He slipped against the leather and strong arms hoisted him back up to the couch.

“No, no, it’s Rhodey—”

Rhodey? But he could have—

It didn’t matter. Just a dream. _Fuck_. “Where’s—where’s Pepper—”

“She’s with a group of agents, they’ve gone to arrest Obadiah.”

Tony groaned as he pushed himself up. “That’s not gonna be enough.”

oOo

Hong Kong was already in ruins when Stephen and Mordo arrived. Smoke and blood were in the streets, fire growing along the edges of buildings and, in the middle of it all, was a purple mass of rippling clouds that devoured everything in its path. There was a universe inside of it, purple and green and looking like those poison frogs in the Amazon with its’ array of black light colours.

“We’re too late,” Mordo said, stepping around the crunched back of a bike. “Dormammu is coming.”

So was Kaecilius. He was walking down the road heading towards them. Stephen breathed in the smoke and ash and felt something bump against his sore sternum.

The Eye of Agamotto.

The magic of _time_.

Resting one hand against Mordo’s shoulder, he did his best to apologize with only the look in his eyes before lifting his hands. Brass groaned as it slid apart and Kaecilius darted forward.

The world stopped.

Reversed.

A second chance was born.

oOo

“Jarvis, what’s my power levels looking like?” The repulsors here hot under the metal and Tony pushed the suit as fast as he dared over the skyline of Los Angeles.

_“Remarkably, sir, they’re at one hundred percent and seem to have no threat of dropping.”_

Tony almost dropped out of the sky and caught himself just in time. “ _What_?”

 _“Despite not being designed for sustained flight,”_ the AI continued almost in shock. If it could be shock. _“The chest piece seems to even be drawing power from some unknown source.”_

“A different power source?” Tony frowned. “Where? Is it dangerous?”

There was a brief moment and he could hear the scan beeping. _“No, sir, it just seems to be powering the arc reactor.”_

This world surprised him every day.

“Keep me posted,” Tony said.

oOo

Stephen grunted as another kick to his ribs sent him falling over the back of a food stand rebuilding itself. He scrambled out of the way as a pan knocked the Zealot in the head and almost got ran over by a car in reverse. The buildings were reforming and the debris beneath his feet was ripped out from under him.

Only the Cloak kept him from face planting into the asphalt. Dust was sucked in, smoke curled on itself, and the dark dimension shrank and shrank and shrank.

One Zealot was trapped inside an aquarium, the second inside a renovated glass room.

The cloak blocked a blow from Kaecilius and Mordo caught the jump kick and whipped the man around into a wall that was being rebuilt. A skyscraper rose above them like a giant waking up and purple clouds pulled away, swallowed as if by a straw in a cup.

And there was Wong, brought back to life by the Eye.

Stephen freed him from the grasps of time and grunted when strong arms yanked him and Mordo into a hug.

“Foolish,” Wong said between them. “ _Both_ of you are so damn _foolish_.”

A shockwave knocked all of them off their feet and Stephen grunted when he slammed into the ground. The green magic around his wrist broke and the world around them stopped moving forwards or backwards.

oOo

“STANE!” Tony’s roar split the sky as he slammed into the massive tank of a suit. Pepper screamed as he and Obadiah went through the ground, down into the lower floors of the building, and burst out into the highway. Tires screeched and horns honked as they crashed through a semi and landed with a screech of metal on the asphalt.

Titanium fingers wrapped around the hood of a car and lifted it, a screaming family inside.

“Put them down!”

Obadiah only laughed. “Collateral damage, Tony!”

Tony looked at the panicked, wide eyes of the mother behind the wheel and at the cold, emotionless eyes of the suit in front of him. “Divert power to chest RT,” he said and heard the repulsors on the hands power down.

_Please don’t fail, please don’t fail, please don’t—_

The blast almost blinded his screen and Jarvis adapted as quickly as he could while Tony darted forward, catching the car before it could hit the ground.

A battery symbol appeared in the lower left hand corner.

 _“Power reduced by nineteen percent.”_ Jarvis said but even as the words finished, the power climbed again. _“Back to one hundred, sir.”_

_The fuck was powering his arc reactor?_

The woman in her car he just saved pressed her foot down on the gas and dragged Tony underneath her front wheels. He got stuck under the back bumper and grunted, pushing the vehicle over his head so it could speed off like a frightened deer.

“Fucking _Christ_ ,” Tony coughed and stumbled back up to his feet.

A motorcycle slapped him through the concrete dividers and into another car, thankfully missing the bus full of people being evacuated. Tony yelped as a massive foot stomped down on his chest. The pressure grinded the metal and made wires spark.

“For thirty years, I've been holding you up!” Obadiah said above him, voice distorted from the helmet. “I built this company from nothing!” He lifted up to smash down again and Tony scrambled to get out of the way only for his ankle to be grabbed. “Nothing is going to stand in my way.”

He was flung into the bus and Tony gasped, the suit digging into his flesh. The world exploded around him and Tony was launched upwards into the air. It was only the fast acting of the repulsors that stopped him from hitting the ground.

“Impressive!” Obadiah cried with gleeful hatred. “You’ve updated your armour!”

Fire bloomed beneath the giant metal feet.

 _Oh **fuck**_.

Tony raced to the stars.

oOo

“Isn’t it beautiful?” Kaecilius said. The world around them was frozen and silent. His footsteps echoed as he walked along the repaired street, through people caught in the middle of actions. “A world beyond time. Beyond death.”

Stephen looked up at the nebula of purples, blues, and pinks. There were structures that seemed too much like the biology videos where cells would walk along multicoloured spheres and pathways. In the middle was the amber glow of the Hong Kong Sanctum. Glass had shattered, smoke and brick billowed outwards, but it seemed like a lighthouse in the dark—a watchful eye about to be popped.

It _was_ beautiful. But in the way that hurricanes were beautiful from space but wrought so much destruction everywhere that they touched. Death had paused so they might see her glory and Stephen, in a moment of pure genius (or pure stupidity), pushed off the ground to fly into the Dark Dimension.

It was neither cold nor hot but existed as though temperature didn’t exist. Perhaps it didn’t. Perhaps it only existed to devour like a constant, starving beast.

Stephen looked back at the lights of Hong Kong until they were gone. Giant purple things floated through the space, folded like the grey matter in the brain, glowing with toxic greens and oranges. Purple electricity crackled in a storm and plumes of gas erupted from cavernous holes. Chains of fleshy substance bonded planet like structures together and he wondered if it was places that Dormammu had already claimed.

He landed on one, the ground was firm beneath his feet, and he summoned a new spell from the Eye of Agamotto.

Eyes watched him. Massive purples eyes made of storms in transition and Stephen floated down to the smaller bit of ground and looked up at Dormammu. Ridges rose and fell, forming in the place of a nose and rippling like waves across a face that seemed to be the size of a moon.

“Human,” the demon sneered. “Come to beg for one last boon?”

Spikes fell from the sky. Stephen summoned his shields and screamed as he was burned from the inside out by a blast that could put a star to shame.

Time reversed.

The spell finished.

Stephen landed and looked up.

“Human,” Domammu sneered, “Come to—” The words trailed off and he leaned back, eyes narrowing, and looked down at the small creature that stood before him. “What is this?” he said and his voice rumbled through the dimension. Planets shifted. “Illusion?”

Stephen shook his head.

“ _Good_.”

Massive sharpened thorns came from the darkness and impaled an already aching chest, driving a low, pained groaned from what was left of his lungs.

Time reversed.

 Stephen landed.

“What is _happening_?” Dormammu searched his own dimension with a snarl before he brought his head down to glare at the human.

His eyes were matched by an impassive stare.

“Insolent worm!”

A hand came down, crushing all in its path.

Time reversed.

A hissing snarl left Domrammu’s lips as he watched Stephen touch down upon the newly mended surface. “You cannot do this forever,” he sneered.

But Stephen was silent and he looked up.

“I _will_ kill you, human.”

Scarred fingers flicked a bit of lint off the cloak and fire burned him alive.

Time reversed.

oOo

Tony panted in his helmet as he chased the moon. There was a roar behind him—Obadiah—and it was steadily getting closer. “Jarvis!”

 _“We have reached maximum speed, Sir_. _”_

“That’s not fast enough!”

oOo

Orange tendrils sprouted from the ground, wrapped around Stephen’s throat, and crushed his windpipe.

Time reversed.

oOo

_“Fifteen meters.”_

“GO GO GO!”

oOo

Lungs gurgled as they drowned in their own blood.

Time reversed.

oOo

_“Fourteen Meters.”_

“Come on, come on, _come on_ —”

oOo

Mouths ripped flesh from bone as Stephen screamed and screamed and _screamed_ until no sound came from his torn and bloody throat.

Time reversed.

oOo

_“Twelve meters.”_

oOo

A meteor mass slammed into his body.

Time reversed.

oOo

_“Eight meters.”_

oOo

Spikes sprouted from the ground and sliced through flesh.

Time reversed.

oOo

_“Five meters.”_

oOo

He was left to die of dehydration, those cold eyes watching until he gasped his final breath.

Time reversed.

oOo

“Two meters.”

oOo

“What is the point of this, human?” Dormammu snarled from above as Stephen slowly dragged himself back up to his feet. “Your desire to keep me trapped has only caused you agony.”

Legs trembled, phantom aches from deaths long passed burned along his flesh, but Stephen looked up and smiled with blood filled teeth.

The demon lurched back. “Trapped,” he snarled, “You want me _trapped_.”

Dormammu howled and spikes rained from the sky.

Time reversed.

oOo

A hand closed around Tony’s ankle and he grunted as the machinery sparked and burst. Large, grey arms closed around him, holding him in a hug even as they shot further into the sky.

“It was a nice try, Tony,” Obadiah yelled over the wind. “But my suit is more advance in every way.”

“Every way, huh?” Tony said, looking across the thin film of ice that shone under the moonlight, turning silver across the dark, dull grey. It crept faster and faster, over glowing eyes and joints. “How’d you solve the icing problem?”

There was a crackle of sparks. “Icing problem?” Obadiah’s voice popped like rice krispies before it cut out.

Tony slammed his fist down on the helmet. “Might want to look into it you son of a bitch.”

Obadiah fell.

oOo

“What do you _want_?” Dormammu’s rage shook through every cell, every tether of being. He was so close, now, that the grooves that moved along his face were the size of canyons.

Stephen looked up with Death hovering at his shoulder, ready to claim him. The Eye of Agamotto was hot against his chest, ready to slip through his grasp and the green, sacred circled spun slowly around his forearm. They had been there for the past ten years. Keeping him alive over and over and over again.

In the depth of his soul, there was an answer. It rose through his chest and his heart before settling in his throat.

“Dormammu,” Stephen said, his voice hoarse and jagged like broken tips of mountains but it was strong and could be heard over the crackle of flame and the fluttering of the Cloak. “I’ve come to _bargain_.”

oOo

Tony landed on the roof of the Arc reactor with one foot and slammed into the bars blocking the glass window from the gravel. “Pepper? Pepper!”

 _“Tony? Oh my God, are you okay?”_ There was a note of hysteria to her voice that came in loud and clear over the headset in the helmet.

He managed to get onto his feet with a groan. The suit screeched around him “Yeah, yeah I’m alright, what about you? Are you—”

Something large and heavy and metal slammed into the helmet and Tony cried out as he was dunked into the ground. “What the fuck!” The screen firtzed and he scrambled back, nausea rolling through his stomach.

“Nice try, Tony!” Obadiah’s voice came somewhere to his left.

Tony raised his hands on instinct only to be pulled into a crushing hug that squeezed the armour into his abdomen. The screen straightened and burst back to life as the middle was slowly being crushed. “Jarvis! _Jarvis!_ ”

The AI’s voice was chopped like an onion on a cutting board. _“Here, sir.”_

“Power to chest, _power to chest_!”

The arc reactor grew brighter and _fired_.  Tony was ripped out of Obadiah’s hold and hit the window. It shattered beneath him, sending glass raining down into the building. Beneath him, Howard Stark’s plan for clean energy sparked.

 “Pepper,” he hissed, “ _Pepper_.”

_“Tony!”_

“Listen to me; I need you to override the reactor and blast the roof.”

 _“Blast the_ — ** _are you crazy_** _?”_

Maybe. “Pepper, _Please_.” He could see Obadiah getting up. Tony used his own repulsors to lift off the remains of the windows and hovered in the air.

_“Okay, okay. Just... give me a second.”_

He saw her enter the building out of the corner of his eye and focused on Obadiah as he stood on the other end of the roof.

“You know Tony, I’m proud of you.” Obadiah took a step forward, closer to the windows.

Tony could see Pepper pulling levers, dialling up knobs, until her hand was over a big, red button.

“In trying to rid the world of weapons, you gave it the best one possible.”

“Oh,” Tony said, as sweat dripped down his nose and every bone in his body throbbed. “Fuck _off_.”

Obadiah lunged.

_“PEPPER!”_

Her hand slammed down on the button and Tony blasted himself out of the way. A shockwave from the reactor knocked into his suit, launching him over the side of the building and into the parking lot. He watched the light stream into the sky before darkness swooped from above and swallowed him whole.

oOo

Stephen landed on the street as the Dark Dimension rumbled above the Hong Kong sanctum. He almost stumbled but the Cloak held him steady, brushing along his arms with a soothing gentleness.

Kaecilius and his zealots turned to face him. “What have you done?”

Licking his bottom lip, Stephen tasted blood and the faint, dulled raspberries of the universe. The muscles along his chest ached, his bones felt as if they had been placed in a blender and then given back. But he smiled a small, smug little smile.

Followers of Dormammu looked down as their flesh began to burn away. Mordo and Wong walked around to stand at Stephen’s side and could do nothing but watch as human bodies were contorted and twisted, rotting away into dark magic as the Dark Dimension claimed what it had given. Mindless, they were swallowed into the torture of infinity and Stephen turned to the destruction that still awaited.

The Eye of Agamotto opened for him one more time and the Hong Kong Sanctum was repaired, the light in its window flickering back to existence. People began to move, chatter returned to the street, and Stephen sighed as he looked around at the life that brimmed the city.

“We did it,” Wong said, looking around them as he stepped towards the Sanctum.

“Yes,” Mordo scoffed. “We did it.”

Stephen turned to look at him and found his friend’s dark eyes focused on the amulet that was still hanging around his neck.

Mordo looked up. “By also violating the natural law.” He shook his head and took a step back, only for fingers to catch on his robes.

Three gazes turned to the pale, shaking hand that had gripped the green fabric and Stephen who had already lost one mentor, who had almost lost his lover, looked at Mordo. “Stay?” he said and his throat was sore and broken and the word was almost nothing more than slurred sounds.

Brown eyes widened, narrowed, then closed. “You play dirty, Stephen.”

Arms wrapped around Mordo’s shoulders and pulled him into a hug. After a moment, Wong joined them and they stood in the middle of the street, trembling and shaking but _alive_.

oOo

_Tony walked down to something burning and leaned against the wall to the kitchen, grinning as Stephen sprayed down their breakfast with a fire extinguisher. He was in a long, white shirt and a pair of Metallica boxers that definitely did not belong to him. Faint pink marks stood out along his neck and over his shoulders, vanishing beneath cotton and black hair was sticking up in every direction._

_Dumping the whole pan into the sink, Stephen turned towards the fridge and froze when he saw Tony._

_“Hi,” he said almost shy, lifting a hand and waving with two fingers. Behind him, the sun glistened off the ocean, sending small little bits of reflected light onto the ceiling and across smooth skin._

_“Good morning,” Tony hooked his arms around slim hips._

_Stephen sighed in mock pain and draped himself partially over the shorter man. “I tried making breakfast.”_

_“I can see that.”_

_“It didn’t cooperate.”_

_Tony chuckled and kissed the corner of a jaw._

_A low hum answered him and Stephen leaned back, eyes soft and smile warm. “Maybe we should just go back to bed.”_

_“Excellent idea, Doctor Strange.”_

_“Thank you, Doctor Stark.”_

oOo

Light dawned on a new day and Tony stood in front of flashing cameras and hungry reporters that gazed up at him like lions in a pit. Agent Coulson with his shitty made up alibi stood in the corner with Pepper who clutched her StarkPad to her chest. Rhodey was off to the side, watching him with a burning gaze that seemed to blaze through his skin and settled in his stomach.

“The truth is,” He said and looked at the camera. “I am Iron Man.”

Noise expanded like a balloon, encompassing the room as people rose to their feet.

oOo

On the other side of the country, sandwiched between Wong and Mordo, Stephen watched the broadcast, threw back his head, and laughed.

 

* * *

 

 

_sometimes urania is kind._

_sometimes she gives the whole galaxy_

_when all you prayed for was a moon._

_Fin_


	2. Author's Note

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> there is currently a sequel in the works! not to worry!

Author Note on

_if only the gods had mercy on us_

 

* * *

 

I was going to hold off writing this until _a soul too deep_ , the sequel, was finished but this story is important to me so I took a break and decided to get this all done first.

 _if only the gods had mercy on us_ is a surprising story that started off as something playful and, to be honest, mostly a joke. In the beginning there were only plans for about five thousand words and nothing but the highlights. Something akin to snippets that could be posted on tumblr.

I had gotten to the scene on the plane and I realized just rewriting the movie was probably the most boring thing I could do as a writer. No creativity, no use of imagination; it was just regurgitation. And I didn’t know what to do at that point so I wrote the cave scene and I wrote the car accident. By part two I realized that combining two known stories of trauma would be a very long, very boring story.

So I changed it.

By Part Two, _if only the gods had mercy on us_ wasn’t a story about love; it was a story about friendship. Two lonely people found each other, they made a relationship together, and they’re so alone when they lose it that one is driven to desperation and the other is doing everything he can to make up for all the arguments they had.

It’s not healthy. It was never meant to be seen as healthy. They _want_ each other so bad so I took it away.

And instead there’s Rhodey and Pepper and Tony realizes that. He opens slowly to Pepper first. He calls Rhodey when he’s trying to get away from the Air Force. Tony’s story is about him touching base with the people whose phone calls he ignored. His friendships are just as important as his romantic relationships.

Stephen, on the other hand, is a quiet, closed off man. He wanted to go to Kamar-Taj to heal and go back to Tony. Everything he wanted was based upon that. Stephen was desperate and someone took advantage of that. He was stripped down to his core and then he found himself in the hands of the Ancient One who was so patient in putting him back together.

There’s a theme at the beginning of Stephen burying his voice, of him not saying what he wants to say, so when the words are taken from him, there’s nothing he can be but _honest._

This story is about personal growth. For the longest time, Tony and Stephen let their relationship define them. Now, it’s them that define the relationship.

And they don’t get what they want in the end; they’re not back together, they don’t have each _other_ (not in the way people expect). But they’re not alone.

Tony has Pepper, he has Rhodey.

And Stephen is between Wong and Mordo.

They’re not lonely anymore.

And that’s the story I ended up writing.

Thank you for enjoying it as much as you have; I’m thankful for every review, every reply, and every kudos!

**Author's Note:**

> i spent ten days on this and if you liked i would really appreciate it if you told me what you thought!
> 
> thank you for reading,
> 
> grim


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